JULY

1992

9 770264 359091

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Classic fantasy in the tradition of Piers Anthony,
Gordon R. Dickson and Terry Brooks

By the author of the bestselling novelisation of

the film, ROBIN HOOD, PRINCE OF THIEVES

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Editor & Publisher

David Pringle
Deputy Editor
Lee Montgomerie
Assistant Editors
Paul Annis, Andrew Tidmarsh,
MatthewDickens, Andy Robertson
Consultant Editor
Simon Ounsley
Advisory Editors
John Clute, Malcolm Edwards,
Judith Hanna
Typesetting & Paste-up
Bryan Williamson
Subscriptions Secretary
Ann Pringle
Circulation Advisers
The Unlimited Dream Company

Address: 217 Preston Drove,
"Brighton BNl 6FL, United
Kingdom. All subscriptions,
back-issue orders, general
correspondence, books for review,
and enquiries about advertising
should be sent to this address.

Subscriptions: £26 for one year (12
issues) in the UK. Cheques or postal
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seas) , postage included. (US dollar
price: $5 surface mail.) All issues
are still in print except numbers 1 ,
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Submissions: stories, in the
2,000-6,000 word range, should be
sent singly and each one must be
accompanied by a stamped
self-addressed envelope of
adequate size. Persons overseas
please send a disposable
manuscript (marked as such) and
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We are unable to reply to writers
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responsibility can be accepted for
loss or damage to unsolicited
material, howsoever caused.
Submissions should be sent to
either of the following addresses:
Lee Montgomerie, 53 Riviera
Gardens, Leeds LS7 3DW
David Pringle, 217 Preston Drove,
Brighton BNl 6FL

interzone

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

No 61 July 1992

CONTENTS

Fiction

Molly Brown: The Vengeance of Grandmother Wu 6

Lawrence Watt-Evans: Fragments 16

John Meaney: Spring Rain 22

Mary A. Turzillo; The Sleel 27

Ian Lee: No Sense of Humour 38

Stephen Blanchard: The Fat People 45

Greg Egan: Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies 53

Features

Interface: Editorial & News 4

Interaction: Readers’ Letters 5

Paul Park: Interview by Nick Griffiths 18

Wendy Bradley: Television Reviews 34

Gregory Feeley: Isaac Asimov 35

Andrew Tidmarsh: Barry Malzberg Bibliography 50

John Clute, Paul McAuley, etc.: Book Reviews 61

Cover byTony Roberts (from his unpublished projectFutureFabJe)

Published monthly.

All material is © Interzone, 1992

ISSN 0264-3596

Printed by KP Litho Ltd, Brighton

Trade distribution through Diamond Magazine
Distribution Ltd., Unit 1,

Burgess Rd., Ivyhouse Lane,

Hastings, E. Sussex TN35 4NR
(tel. 0424 430422)

Bookshop distribution through Central Books,

99 Wallis Rd., London E9 5LN
(tel. 081 896 4854)

U.S. and Canadian distribution through Worldwide
Magazine Distributors Ltd., Unit 14 — 225 Bysham
Park Drive, Woodstock, Ontario N4T IPl,

Canada (tel. 519 539 0200) - both trade
and individual queries welcomed.

intorzone July 1992. 3

EDITORIAL & NEWS

Interface

David Pringle

The passing of Isaac Asimov (1920-
1992] does seem to mark the end of an
era in the science-fiction field. Possi-
bly that field will go down in history
as a “mid-20th-century” phenomenon,
its Heroic Age precisely those decades
- the 1940s and 50s - which Asimov
did so much to enrich. A great pro-
selytizer for science, a sane and liberal
influence on the millions who read
him, Asimov was one of sf ’s few house- ■
hold names, famed for his hundreds of
non-fiction books as well as for his
novels and stories. The verdict is still
out on the fat bestselling novels of his
“comeback” period, from Founda-
tion’s Edge (1982) onwards, but the
early fiction, from Pebble in the Sky
and I, Robot (both 1950) to The Naked
Sun (1957) and Nine Tomorrows
(1959), will certainly be remembered
for a long time.

With the deaths of Robert Heinlein
and Clifford Simak in 1988, and now
Asimov, the ranks of science fiction’s
Heroic-Age generation are thinning.
Having said that, L. Sprague de Camp
(born 1907), Jack Williamson (born
1908), Fritz Leiber (born 1910), Andre
Norton (born 1912), A.E. van Vogt
(born 1912), Arthur C. Clarke (born
1917), Philip Jose Farmer (born 1918),
Frederik Pohl (born 1919), Ray Brad-
bury (born 1920) and other veterans of
the field are all still writing. Long may
they thrive.

Awards Time

Congratulations to two British writers,
both contributors to Interzone, who
have recently won awards in America.
Gwyneth Jones is the first recipient of
the James Tiptree Award (given to the
best sf work on a “gender” theme), for
her novel The White Queen (Gollancz).
And Ian McDonald has gained the
Philip K. Dick Award (given to the best
sf/fantasy paperback original) for his
fantasy novel King of Morning, Queen
of Day (Bantam).

Also announced recently were the
winners of the British Science Fiction
Association Awards:

Best novel: The Fall of Hyperion by
Dan Simmons; runner up Eternal Light
by Paul J. McAuley.

Best short fiction: “Bad Timing” by
Molly Brown; runner up “Floating
Dogs” by Ian McDonald.

Best dramatic presentation; Ter-
minator 2: Judgement Day; runner up
Red Dwarf IV.

Best artwork: Mark Harrison, cover for
Dreamlands and IZ 48; runner up
Geoff T aylor, cover for The B one Forest
and IZ 45.

Other Mags

Prospective contributors continually
ask us for the addresses of other British
magazines to which they can submit sf
and fantasy short stories. We tell them:
read Interzone - other magazines
advertise in our pages from tim? to
time, and you’ll see some of them men-
tioned in our editorial and review col-
umns. (Those who want American
market information should take out a
subscription to Science-Fiction
Chronicle: see our Small Ads.)

Of course, the trouble with other
folks’ magazines is that some of them
come and go rather rapidly. The gap
left by Fear has tempted a few pub-
lishers into producing new horror-
related titles. A recent horror-and-grue
magazine which seems to have van-
ished in the blink of an eye was called
Terror. Another called Shivers has just
been announced by the publishers of
the sf/media magazine Starburst.
Meanwhile, Allan Bryce’s The Dark
Side carries on as before. But none of
these horror-cum-film mags carries
much fiction.

You will find fiction, and plenty of
it, in the new sf magazine Far Point
(editor Charlie Rigby , Victoria Publica-
tions, PO Box 47, Grantham,- Lines.
NG31 8RJ). This glossy, 64-page
magazine has impressed everybody
who has seen it by actually producing
four or five issues on time, as sche-
duled . . .It publishes many of the same
authors as IZ, including some recent
near-simultaneous “discoveries” such
as Julian Flood and Sarah Ash; and
even its artwork is improving now that
David Hardy has consented to become
its art editor. All power to Far Point’s
elbow; it can only enliven the scene
and provide expanded opportunities
for new British writers.

Also out recently was the delayed
second issue of New Moon SF, the
large-format, glossy revamp of the
erstwhile small-press Dream magazine
(publisher Trevor Jones, 1 Ravenshoe,
Godmanchester, Huntingdon, Cambs.
PEI 8 8DE). This one may not appear
as frequently as Far Point, and it may
not be able to pay its contributors as
generously, but it’s a solid magazine
with fiction from the likes of Keith

Brooke, Eric Brown, Peter F. Hamilton
and E.R. James. Another delayed
second issue (only about nine months
late) was Nexus, which carries new fic-
tion by Geoff Ryman, no less, as well
as articles by Colin Greenland, Bob
Shaw and other notables. It’s perhaps
advisable that you not submit fiction
to this one, as it only publishes a
couple of stories per issue and its fre-
quency is in doubt; but it’s well worth
a read (editor Paul Brazier, PO Box
1123, Brighton BNl 6JS).

There are many other small-press sf
magazines, among them BBR, Exuber-
ance and Scheherazade (see reviews
and mentions in past issues of IZ). One
piece of advice to prospective con-
tributors; your chances of acceptance
will be much improved if you actually
read the magazines concerned before
you submit to them. This is called
researching your market, and it’s
something which all too many would-
be writers fail to do.

Critical Wave

Not infrequently, we are also asked to
provide information on .upcoming
conventions and other social events in
the worlds of sf, fantasy and horror.
Unfortunately, these are so numerous
that we can’t afford the time or space
to list or report on them all. (I’d like to
say a belated thanks, though, to the
organizers of “Trincon 400” in Dublin,
February 1992, and to the committee
of “Illumination,” the British Easter SF
Convention, in Blackpool, April 1992,
for inviting me to represent Interzone
at their very enjoyable events.)

One useful British source for all such
information is the bimonthly news
magazine Critical Wave. Edited by
Steve Green and Martin Tudor, this is
available for £7.50 per six issues from
“Critical Wave Publications,” 33 Scott
Rd., Olton, Solihull, W. Midlands B92
7LQ (£10 Europe or $25 USA, airmail).
Recent issues not only list all upcom-
ing conventions, but contain news of
such events as the following . . .

The takeover of Macdonald pub-
lishers by the American company Lit-
tle, Brown; the move of editor John Jar-
rold from Macdonald-as-was to Cen-
tury/Legend, where he has taken up
Deborah Beale’s old job (Ms Beale, if
you recall, has gone to edit sf at
Anthony Cheetham’s new publishing
outfit, Orion); the bankruptcy of
Pegasus Publishing, the Birmingham

4 Interzone July 1992

company which issued such sf-related
magazines as Gamesman and Fan-
tazia; the fire which destroyed the
Book Inn, a well-known Charing Cross
Road, London, bookshop which
specialized in sf (yes, some copies of
Interzone were probably lost there);

. . . and so on. Critical Wave also con-
tains copious news of forthcoming
books and films; obituaries of writers
such as Angela Carter and Isaac
Asimov, and film-makers such as
Irwin Allen and Jack Arnold; inter-
views with and short articles by those
yet living; and much more. Recom-
mended — this news-sheet’s only seri-
ous failing is its relative infrequency:
we could do with it every month.

(David Pringle)

Interaction

Dear Editors:

I think much of Interzone’s success -
of which a 10th anniversary is ade-
quate proof — lies in the catholicity of
its range of fiction (and of its critical
approach). This naturally means that
readers may find some of its contents
uncongenial, but will also find plenty
to keep them happily faithful. And
every so often, for every reader, along
comes an item, or even an entire issue,
to make him or her joyful and expec-
tant of more of the same.

Why do I personally place the April
anniversary issue in that most-reward-
ing category? Because so many of the
stories are in themselves IZ-microcos-
mic, reflective of that distinctive
catholicity of style and content. J.G.
Ballard’s “The Message from Mars,”
for example, starts, with overtones of
traditional hard sf and satire, in the key
of Ballard’s own recent definition of
the genre (in Science-Fiction Studies
#55). He has there declared it “an
exhilarating and challenging enter-
tainment fiction...” Despite Ballard’s
deprecation (in that same journal) of
any postmodern classification or
interpretation, he, in the ending of that
story, as the debris of years crumbles
around his self-entombed and silent
astronauts, is writing, perhaps maigre
Jui, postmodern fiction.

Again, both Robert Irwin’s “The
Monastery of Alcobaca” and Ian
McDonald’s “The Best and the Rest of
James Joyce” are stories framed recog-
nizably within sf conventions (“archi-
val discoveries” and “alternative
worlds” respectively); but each author
employs his frame to give substance to
frontier speculation: Irwin about
thought-forms, language and informa-
tion-transmission; McDonald about
the inter-relationships of culture-
forms, the subconscious and music.
Culture-forms and the subconscious
are also essential elements in the

integrative/disintegrative interplay of
action and image in Storm Constan-
tine’s “Priest of Hands,” a truly post-
modern fantasy, but one using a
thoroughly familiar sf vehicle (“the
flying city”), which has ancestry
stretching back through the Okie voy-
ages to Laputa.

SMS’s illustration of “Priest of
Hands” quite remarkably emphasizes
the story’s eclecticism and seems
through successive pages almost to
trace a pattern of styles, relating them
loosely to the narrative: first a sugges-
tion of oriental utopia, then a Dore-like
cliff of sombre masonry, succeeded by
a tableau of art nouveau fantasy, con-
cluding with a drama of persona:! ten-
sions, wonderfully echoed by the ten-
sions depicted between architectonic
form and unbounded space, between
rootedness and launching-out. Kevin
Cullen’s illustrations for the McDon^d
story complement that with equal bril-
liance, establishing links between
traditional sf iconography and meta-
phors native to the late 20th century.

Add those blends of realism, fantasy
and madness in the M. John Harrison
and Graham Joyce stories, and you
have a template for the “fiction”
section of the magazine, which, grant-
ing a flexibility which might not
exclude the harder sf or the rigours
(and rigors) of grand guignol, could
maintain Interzone’s individuality
and success far into the future.

K.V. Bailey

Alderney, Channel Islands
Dear Editors:

I’ve been subscribing on and off to
Interzone for five or six years (apart
from a period of unemployment). And
on the whole I’m quite happy with it.

The Storm Constantine story in issue
58 was great — the best story I’ve read
from you in a long time. I like stories
that are really atmospheric. I had a real
sense of enclosed near-claustrophic
spaces. The ancient floating city laden
with history and arcane rituals came
across well. The final moment of trans-
cendence was exciting. The characters
did struggle to get there. Cathartic.
Paul A. Woodward
Birmingham

Dear Editors:

I would like to apologize for not getting
around to filling in the Reader’s Poll.
The reason I have not written to you
before is that I am generally happy
with the standard of fiction provided
by Interzone. The reason I am writing
now is to plead the case for some of
the stories that ended up at the bottom
of the list, particularly Elizabeth
Hand’s “The Bacchae.” Now person-
ally I read sf because it is a medium
which encourages the exploration of
new ideas, or new ways of looking at
old ideas, or else just challenges the
way you think.

“The Bacchae” was one of those
stories which make me glad I subscribe
to IZ, because otherwise I would never
have read it. The heavy irony is
reminiscent of Muriel Spark’s “The
Driving Seat” (which is not really sf,
but I heartily recommend it). Perhaps
your largely male readership don’t
appreciate irony when they think it is
directed at them. I am curious as to
whether those who gave it a negative
vote did so because they didn’t under-
stand it, or understood it and didn’t
like the message.

Another story which reinforced my
enthusiasm for IZ was number 50 in
the list, Alan Heaven’s “The Hauler-In
Susie M.” I found the idea of a whole
community based in an abattoir faintly
disturbing. This is good — I want stories
that make me think about my view of the
world. I like well-written stories, with
humour and clever plotting, and I would
like you to continue printing stories
like this, but the main reason I sub-
scribe to Interzone is for the odd story
which makes me think. Please carry on
printing anything controversial.

Jane Carlton

Dear Editors:

Each month I buy Tnterzone off the
shelf and wonder, “Should I take out
a subscription?” After all, there’s some
good stuff: “The Staked Plain” by
Boren (57), “WW3” by Di Filippo (55),
“Bad Timing” by Brown (54), and the
memorable “George and the Comet” by
Baxter (52). Then I settle down to read
the lead story and, a page later, decide
that no way can I subscribe to this con-
voluted crap. Take for example, from
the issues mentioned above, Egan’s
“Before” and “The Hundred Light-
Year Diary”; doze to the drone of Brin’s
“What Continues, What Fails...”;
wrestle with Mary Gentle’s “Jeru-
salem.” These are examples of story-
telling at pretty near its worst. Reading
fiction should be a pleasure, not a
struggle or a bore.

Am I in the minority, or is this pre-
cisely why I have detected a shift,
albeit a small one, in the type of stories
Interzone has been publishing over the
last half dozen issues or so?

I’m not a hard sf fan - mainly
because I don’t know enough about sci-
ence; but I don’t see why hard sf should
be synonymous with bloody-hard-to-
read sf. IZ seems to think it should be.
Having said that, your mix of stories is
better now than it was a while ago.
Could this be because (1) You failed to
impress the Americans enough, in the
swap, to fork out extra cash; (2) Far
Point and New Moon are nibbling at
your heels? In my view you do need to
continue this trend of diversification
if IZ is not to being walking backwards.
David Logan

NewtoM'nabbey, N. Ireland

Continued on page 21

interzone July 1992 5

Wayne nearly choked as he opened the door. She
was standing in the middle of the sitting room, hold-
ing at least a dozen sticks of burning incense in one
hand. With the other, she was dropping little rectang-
les of paper, hand-painted to resemble English
money, into a small fire which raged inside a metal
rubbish bin. “Grandmother, please! Someone will call
the Fire Brigade.”

She ignored him and dropped the remaining paper
rectangles into the fire. She did this all the time. First
she would cut the paper into pieces of the right size
and shape. Then she would paint them gredn and
draw the symbols for £5 or £10 or even £100 in the
corners. Finally, she would burn them in the rubbish
bin, adding to her grandson ’s conviction that she must
be crazy.

Wayne often wondered how this woman could
have given birth to his mother. They were so totally
different. His mother had been soft and gentle. He
used to think of her as fragile and almost translucent,
like the dust on a butterfly’s wings. Her death from
cancer had seemed inevitable; she was never really

S trips of coloured paper covered in Chinese
writing hung suspended over a Soho doorway
and flapped in the early autumn breeze. Wayne
McKenzie sighed when he saw them. They meant that
she was at it again. He’d find her upstairs, muttering
something he couldn’t understand and filling the
apartment with smoke.

Hg wished his mother was still alive. She hadn t
been able to control the old woman, but at least she
could communicate with her. He spoke enough Can-
tonese to get by, but not enough to make his grand-
mother understand him when she didn’t want to.

Like the time she’d started a bonfire in the middle
of Shaftesbury Avenue. It took him ages to sort that
one out with the police, and even longer to sort it out
with her. She protested that the spirits would be angry
if they didn’t get their offerings, and Wayne explained,
more in sign language than in Cantonese, that she
must not burn her offerings in the street. He felt a sense .
of triumph when she nodded and went back upstairs,
but his triumph was to be short-lived. From that day
on, she burned her offerings in the living room.

6 intory.ono July 1992

meant for this world. But this woman standing before
him, his mother’s mother, was four and a half feet of
solid rock, strung together with wire. Ninety-six years
old, with hair the colour of steel and eyes like two
black raisins, she seemed as much a part of the earth
as a mountain. She looked up as she dropped the last
paper rectangle into the hin and told him that dinner
would he ready in a minute.

“You know you don’t have to cook for me, Grand-
mother,’’ he said, following her into the kitchen. “I
keep telling you we can have anything you want sent
up from the restaurant.’’

She chose not to understand a word he was saying,
and busied herself hacking vegetables into tiny pieces
with a cleaver. Wayne walked back into the living
room and opened all the windows. He stuck his head
outside and took several deep breaths. How could the
old woman stand all that smoke? His eyes and throat
were burning, but it never seemed to bother her. If
anything, she seemed to thrive on it.

The chopping in the kitchen stopped and he heard
her half-singing some of her usual mumbo-jiimbo. He

knew what she was up to. She was putting some food
aside for the spirits. His father would never have put
up with all this nonsense. Fifteen years in the Orient
hadn’t even made a dent in his practical and totally
materialistic view of life.

W ayne had been seventeen when his father
died, nearly twenty years earlier. He was
there when it happened: he watched in
amazement as his mother calmly addressed the
corpse in the hospital hed and apologized for the fact
that it would be impossible to cut a hole in the roof,
but she would open a window for him. “Mother, what
are you doing?" he asked her, thinking she’d gone
mad with grief.

“Your father’s spirit needs to be let out or he will
stay trapped in this room," she explained, adding,
“He has much farther to go yet. Soon we will help
him on his way.”

One night, several weeks after the funeral, Wayne's
mother woke him hours before dawn and told him to
get dressed, they were going out. She was wearing

iiil4‘r/:oii4^ July 1992 7

her most expensive suit, her best pearls, and her high-
est heels. The leather bag she carried was her largest.

It was a clear, warm summer night. They walked
for what seemed like ages, each wrapped up in their
own thoughts. Wayne’s thoughts were to do with his
mother’s mental state. First she’d insisted he go for a
walk with her in the wee small hours, then she’d
insisted he wear a suit. He really started to worry
when they reached Hyde Park. Despite his insistence
that she shouldn’t go walking through the park at
night, she kept on going. He had no choice but to
follow her. She came to a halt at the edge of the Ser-
pentine lake.

“Mother, why are we here?”

She signalled silence with a finger to her lips. She
reached into her bag, pulled out a piece of cloth, and
placed it on the ground. Then she adjusted her skirt
and got down on her knees. She reached into the bag
again and produced a little wooden boat with a sail
made of paper. She placed this on the ground beside
her and pulled out a candle and a box of matches.
This was followed by several tiny gift-wrapped par-
cels and a folded one-pound note. Wayne watched
intently as she carefully balanced the candle in the
centre of the boat, surrounded by its gift-wrapped
cargo. She whispered something that Wayne couldn’t
hear, lowered the boat into the water, and lit the can-
dle. Then she gave the boat a gentle shove. The little
boat floated away, and they eventually lost sight of it
as the glow of the candle became indistinguishable
from the light of the moon reflected on the water.

Finally, Mei-Lee McKenzie stood up and brushed
a dead leaf away from her stocking. “Are you
finished?” Wayne asked her. She nodded. “So what
was all that about?”

Mei-Lee shook her head and then smiled a sad little
half-smile at her son. “The flame of the candle,” she
began, ”is your father’s soul. I have launched him
upon his journey to the world of the spirits.”

“Mother,” Wayne interrupted her, moaning in dis-
belief, “you’ve just launched a burning wax stick onto
the Serpentine! Since when,” he pointed across the
water, “is Bayswater the world of the spirits?”

he telephone woke Wayne from his reverie. He
answered it on the second ring.

“There’s somebody here from Callahan’s
office. He’s got the lease for number twenty-four.” It
was Sammy Chong, calling from the restaurant.

“I’ll be right down.” Wayne popped his head into
the kitchen just in time to see his grandmother set the
spirits’ portion of food alight. “I have some business
to take care of. You go ahead and have dinner; I’ll
grab something downstairs.”

She looked up from her chopping board. “Stop him,
Siao-Te,” a voice said. “For his own good, you must
stop him.”

Wayne was halfway down the stairs when he turned
around and saw his grandmother coming after him,
still holding her cleaver. “What’s the matter?”

“Don’t go,” she told him.

“I don’t understand. What do you want?”

“Don’t go.”

“Grandmother, please go back upstairs. Someone’s
waiting for me.”

“No. Bad things will happen.”

Wayne ignored her and kept walking. Within
seconds, she was at his side.

“Go back upstairs.”

“I’m coming with you.”

They reached the doorway that led into his office.
He pointed to the cleaver, saying, “Give me that. You
can’t go walking into the restaurant carrying that
thing!” There was a brief tug-of-war before she gave
in and handed it over. He hid the cleaver in a desk
drawer and then they headed into the dining room.

Sammy Chong was sitting with a middle-aged and
overweight Western man at a table by the window.
“Here comes my boss now,” Sammy said. The man
stood up and shook Wayne’s hand.

“Wayne, this is Joe Simpson. He’s Mr Callahan’s
partner.”

“Nice to meet you,” Joe Simpson said, pumping
Wayne’s hand up and down enthusiastically.

“This is my grandmother, Mrs Siao-Te Wu,” Wayne
said. “I’m afraid she doesn’t speak any English.”

“I see,”*Joe Simpson said, nodding. The man’s huge
stomach nearly burst through his shirt as he bent over
to take one of Wu Siao-Te’s hands and shake it sol-
emnly. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs Wu,” he said
slowly and loudly.

“Why is this fat man shouting at me?” Siao-Te asked
Sammy Chong, who spoke much better Cantonese
than her grandson.

“He thinks because you don’t speak English, you
must be deaf.”

“And my grandson wants to do business with this
idiot?”

“What’s she saying?” Joe Simpson asked.

“She says it’s nice to meet you, too.”

They all sat down at the table and a uniformed wai-
ter brought them the “Special Dinner For Four.” Siao-
Te didn’t touch the food. She sat, watching and listen-
ing. “What’s all this about?” she whispered to Sammy.

“Wayne wants to open an amusement arcade. This
is the man who owns the lease,” Sammy whispered
back.

“Amusement arcade?”

“You know, where people play with machines.
Video games and fruit machines.”

Siao-Te nodded gravely. She’d seen these
machines. People put in lots of money, little pictures
moved around and when they stopped, people put in
more money. Wayne should become rich owning
these machines. So why was she worried?

“This will lead him into danger,” the voice told
her. “Don’t let him sign those papers.”

“Wayne,” she said, “Do not sign any papers.”

“Excuse me, Mr Simpson,” Wayne said before turn-
ing away to see what his grandmother wanted. “What
did you say?” he asked her in Cantonese.

“Don’t sign any papers,” she told him again.

“Grandmother, please!” He turned back to Joe
Simpson, who handed him a pen. He signed his name
in three places.

Siao-Te sighed and closed her eyes. Maybe it will
be all right, she thought silently. “HMMPH!” said the
voice.

The next morning, while Wayne was downstairs
going over some invoices with Sammy, the old
woman made her way into the street. Quite a few

8 interzone July 1992

heads turned as the tiny woman in cotton pyjamas
hobbled by on feet that had been tightly bound from
infancy until the day that she had dared to pull off
the bandages and cause a scandal. Just as she had
ignored the villagers who condemned her as a wicked
woman for unwrapping her feet, she ignored those
who stared after her now. She had business to attend
to.

T hat afternoon, an elderly man in a grey busi-
ness suit walked into the restaurant, placed
his briefcase on one of the tables, and intro-
duced himself to Sammy as Mr Han. He took out a
compass and a notebook and began to survey the
room, walking in a slow circle. “I see the kitchen faces
to the West,” he said. “That’s very good.”

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

Mr Han stopped. “Aren’t you Wayne McKenzie?”
Sammy shook his head. “No, he’s not here right
now. But I’m the manager. Perhaps I can help you, if
you’ll just tell me what you want.”

“There’s nothing I want,” Mr Han said gravely. “I’m
here because Mrs Wu asked me to come.”

“She did?”

“Yes. I’m here to check your fung shui.”

“Just a minute. I’ll get my boss.”

Wayne picked up the telephone and listened.
“There’s a what man downstairs?”

“A fung shui man.”

“Oh God, more superstitious nonsense. Thank him
and tell him we don’t require his services.”

“He says your grandmother asked him to come.”
“I’ll be down in a minute.” He slammed down the
phone and shouted, “Grandmother!”

A short while later, Wayne, Sammy, Siao-Te and
Mr Han were seated around a table. Wayne stared
down at the table-cloth. Sammy tried hard not to
laugh. Mr Han made notes on a pad and drew some
diagrams. He explained that Wayne’s desk was facing
in the wrong direction; it should be turned around to
encourage prosperity. He made some suggestions for
symbols to hang on tbe wall and he was quite adamant
about putting a fish tank at the front of the restaurant.
That was very good fung shui.

Siao-Te interrupted to say that she wasn’t worried
about the restaurant; she knew it had good fung shui.
It was the other place she was concerned about. Mr
Han nodded. “Then I must look at this other place.
Where is it?”

Siao-Te shrugged and said she didn’t know. Then
she turned and asked her grandson.

“Just down the street. At number twenty-four.”
Siao-Te and Mr Han joined in a simultaneous gasp
of horror.

“What’s the matter?” Wayne asked in English.

The sight of the two old people with their mouths
hanging open was too much for Sammy. He giggled.

“Very bad fung shui,” Mr Han said grimly. “Very
bad. Number four means death. With two in front you
get ‘easy death’.”

“You’re joking!”

Sammy was laughing out loud.

“No,” Mr Han said. “I do not joke. You must not
open a business at number twenty-four.”

Wayne saw the look of horror in his grandmother’s

eyes, the way her whole body had gone rigid, and he
nearly laughed, too. “Look,” he said, trying to keep
his voice level. “There’s more to a place than just the
address, isn’t there?”

Mr Han nodded, and rose up from the table. Soon
he and Wayne were heading down the street with
Siao-Te hobbling along beside them.

Wayne opened the door to number twenty-four
with a flourish. “See. It’s a nice big room with plenty
of natural light. Fruit machines will go all along that
wall there, games over there. I’ve ordered all the latest
ones, really popular with the kids these days. Fortune-
telling machine in the corner there, and a simulated
ride to Mars in the middle. It’s gonna be great; a real
money-spinner. ”

Mr Han looked around and sighed. Everything was
wrong. The room was the wrong shape. The storefront
faced the wrong way and was at the apex of a T-junc-
tion: dreadful fung shui. A neighbouring building cast
a shadow across it. And of course there was the
number |)ainted across the doorway; the number for
easy death.

“Okay,” Wayne said, humouring the man, “What
do you suggest? How can I improve the fung shui
here?”

Mr Han shook his head sadly and said there was
nothing he could do; he wished he had been called
in earlier, before Wayne had signed the lease. His only
suggestion was that Wayne should lock the door
behind him and leave the place empty.

“And how much do I owe you for your valuable
time?” Wayne asked sarcastically.

“Nothing. I cannot help you.” He muttered an apol-
ogy to Siao-Te and then he left.

Wayne would have nothing to do with Mr Han’s
advice; he sneered and called it superstition. He had
invested a lot of money; he’d already ordered the
machines from a firm in Essex. He would go ahead
exactly as planned. The only concession he would
make was to put a fish tank in the restaurant, and that
was only because he thought it would look nice.

That night, when she was alone in her room, the voice
in Siao-Te’s head couldn’t resist telling her, “I told
you so.”

Yes, Siao-Te thought tiredly, you told me.

“Y ou had your doubts, but I knew best, now didn’t I?”

Yes, you were right. I should never have doubted,
she thought in silent apology. She was getting a little
annoyed with all this nagging. He never used to nag;
maybe old age was affecting him, too. No, she
reminded herself, age could not affect him.

“My love, my love. How could you ever doubt me,
my love? Haven’t I always been truthful with you?”

There was something about the way he said “my
love” that still made her body tingle. Yes, Siao-Te
nodded, you have never tried to deceive me. From
their very first encounter, all those long years ago, he
had been totally honest as to who and to what he was.

S he was married at fourteen to a farmer named
Wu Fung-Lao. He was a widower in his late
forties who wanted someone young and strong
to work in the fields and around the house, so a deal
was struck with Siao-Te’s parents, and the young girl
found herself in the house of a stranger.

interzono July 1992 9

She spent her days bent over double in a field, and
then she would enter the house towards evening,
exhausted, and make the supper. Her husband barely
spoke to her except to chide her for being lazy; his
first wife had been a much better worker. When dark-
ness fell, she would lie down beside him and grif her
teeth at the feel of his hot sour breath and the clumsy
mounting of her body. Later, as he snored beside her,
she would dream the romantic dreams of a fourteen-
year-old girl: of a heroic sfranger who would rescue
her from this living hell, of a man she could love.

The next day would bring the same routine: the
daylight hours spent toiling in the fields, the evening
with a man whose touch she despised, and the time
of dreams, when she could be alone with the hero of
her fantasies.

One evening, she came home from the fields, her
back aching as usual and her husband waiting for his
supper as usual, when an extraordinary thing hap-
pened. Her husband leapt into the air and stayed
there, floating high above her head.

“Wu Fung-Lao! ” she cried. “What are you doing?”

“1 AM NOT WU FUNG-LAO!” roared a voice she
had never heard before. She watched open-mouthed
as the body of her husband turned cartwheels through
the air and then stopped, hanging upside down. She
cowered in terror as her husband’s face became
engorged with blood, the skin turning redder and red-
der, the eyes so huge she feared that they would pop
right out.

“Stop!” she cried. “Please put him down.”

Her husband spun right-side-up and dropped until
he hovered only an inch from the ground. His mouth
opened wide and a series of animal sounds came from
his throat, everything from the cluck of a chicken to
the roar of a lion. “DO YOU SEE MY POWER?”
boomed the voice, the voice that was not her hus-
band’s.

“Yes, I see your power,” she whispered.

“HA! ” boomed the voice as the body of her husband
touched the floor and stood with arms spread in a
gesture of triumph.

“Who are you?”

“I AM A DEMON, COME FROM THE NETHER-
WORLD TO TORMENT THE LIVING.” Her husband’s
body rose into the air once again.

She ran to the door, but it wouldn’t open. She tried
to scream, but the scream stuck somewhere in the
back of her throat. She collapsed to the floor, trembl-
ing. She clutched at her knees, and rolled herself into
a ball, rocking back and forth with her eyes closed.
There was a long silence, and then a voice said,
“Please don’t do that.” Siao-Te froze. “Don’f be
afraid,” the voice continued. “I won’t harm you.”

Siao-Te didn’t move, didn’t open her eyes. “Why,”
she whispered shakily, “why are you doing this to
me?”

“I will do nothing to you. I can see you are just a
child.”

Her eyes snapped open. “I am not a child!”

The demon chuckled sadly. “You are. Even though
I am condemned to wander as a demon, I will not
torment a child.”

“I am not a child. I am a married woman.”

“Married to this?” The demon indicated the body
of Wu Fung-Lao with a sweep of her husband’s arm.

He shook her husband’s head and clucked in pity.
“And I thought I was the miserable one.”

Siao-Te straightened her back and looked directly
at him. It was still her husband’s face, but with an
expression she had never seen. He looked almost wist-
ful.

“I didn’t think demons were miserable. I thought
they were bitter and vengeful.”

“I am that as well,” the demon replied.

“Have you always been a demon?” Siao-Te’s eyes
were wide with interest. She’d totally forgotten to be
afraid.

“No, not always.” He looked at her and smiled, a
sad little half-smile. “Gome nearer, and you shall hear
what I have told no other living person.”

Siao-Te moved closer, and the demon told her the
source of his bitterness and his misery: his name was
Zhang-Gho and he had been a soldier and personal
bodyguard to an emperor of the Wei dynasty. There
was an attempt on the emperor’s life, and Zhang-Gho
alone fou^t off seven swordsmen. But the eighth
drove a blade through his heart, wrenching his spirit
from his body less than one week before the day he
was to marry. The violence of his sudden death and
the anger he felt about missing his wedding had com-
bined to make him a demon, stalking the earth for
victims to possess and torment.

“I had only twenty-two years before my life was
sfolen from me, and I never had a wife. Now those
whose lives have not yet been stolen must bear my
wrath.”

“And this is how you show your wrath? To take
another’s body?”

“Yes.”

“And do you ever give the body back?”

“Of course! That’s the whole point.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s always the same. The victim and his family
agree to worship me. Then they build an altar in the
centre of the room with incense burning at all times,
and I receive regular offerings of food and money.”

“That makes you leave?”

“And I never come back.”

Zhang-Gho, the demon, watched her through her
husband’s eyes while she sat on the floor with her
chin in her hand, thinking. She had a problem. She
liked the demon a lot more than she liked her hus-
band, and he seemed to like her, too. And he’d said
he was only twenty -two years old when he was killed.

“Demon,” she said.

“Yes?”

“What do you look like?”

“I am a spirit.”

“I know. . .but what did you look like? It’s hard to
know how to talk to you when all I can see is the body
of my husband.”

The demon told her to close her eyes once more.
She did, and in her mind’s eye he stood before her in
silken robes and gleaming armour, brandishing a
sword which he placed at her feet with an exaggerated
bow. She felt as though she could reach out and touch
his topknot of fhick black hair. Then the demon raised
his head and she saw into his eyes.

Siao-Te had fallen into a whirlpool and there was
nothing she could do about it. She might scream and
flail her arms, but she knew it wouldn’t save her. She

10 intpraioin- July 1992

knew she was drowning, and she didn’t care if she
ever came up for air again. “Demon,” she whispered.
“Yes?”

“If worshipping you will make you leave, then I
don’t want to worship you.”

“Then it is my turn to ask you a question.”

“Yes?”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to leave.”

“Why should I stay?”

“Because...” Siao-Te hesitated, gathering all her
courage. “Because I want to he your wife.”

O ne day, a Mrs Tan walked into her house to
find her husband floating near the ceiling.
“Tan Lo-Hua!” she shouted. “What do you
think you’re doing?”

“I am not Tan Lo-Hna,” replied a weedy little voice
nothing like her husband’s. “I am Wn Fung-Lao, the
farmer, and I have been cast out of my own home by
my wicked wife and her demon lover.”

“Puh!” Mrs Tan spat in disgust. “You lying spirit!
I saw Wu Fnng-Lao the farmer just today, in the village
with his pretty young wife. It does my .heart good to
see two people so obviously in love. How can you tell
such evil lies with her expecting a baby any time
now?”

She sent for a priest, who prodded the possessed
body with needles until the spirit of Wu Fung-Lao
promised to go away and never come back.

Meanwhile, people in the village began to talk.
Wasn’t it strange, they wondered out loud, the way
Wu Fung-Lao looked younger every day? At forty-
five, he’d been a scrawny matchstick of a man. Now
at fifty-one, he had the strength of ten with muscles
to match. And he’d always had such a scratchy little
voice, nothing like the deep rumble he spoke with
these days. Many in the village thought these were
signs of evil doings. Others, like Mrs Tan, said these
were merely the effects of love.

The time finally came when the body of Wu Fung-Lao
could stand no more. The years had taken their toll,
despite the best efforts of the demon. Skin shrivelled,
arteries clogged, and bones became brittle. The heart
that once belonged to a farmer named Wu Fung-Lao
was worn out after seventy-nine years of beating, and
wanted to stop.

Zhang-Cho told his wife that it was time for him to
go. He lay down on their bed and closed his eyes.
“No, you can’t leave me.”

“I must. This body refuses to hold me.”

“Then find another.”

. But he told her that though he did not want to leave
her, he was no longer bitter and now swore that he
would not take another’s body against his will. He
had found what he’d searched for through centuries
of torment and wandering: the normal lifespan and
the happy marriage he had once been robbed of. The
last statement to come from the throat of the former
Wu Fung-Lao was that he would always love her.

Siao-Te did not cnt a hole in the roof for Zhang-
Cho’s spirit, or even open a window. Instead, she went
around the honse and sealed up every opening she
could find.

“Zhang-Cho!” she called from the middle of the

intorxono July 1992 1 1

room, “You cannot leave me. I have blocked every
exit so there is no way out. You said you would never
take another’s body against their will - 1 tell you now
that it is my will. Make my body your new home.”

A soft breeze blew against her ear. “How can I, my
darling? I would never cast you out of yours.”

“You don’t need to. My body may be small, but I
have room in here for two.”

And that is how Zhang-Cho the demon came to live
inside her head.

W ayne ordered a giant fish tank and an assort-
ment of brightly-coloured tropical fish.
When they arrived, they were given a pro-
minent display just inside the front door. He even
turned the desk in his office around and covered the
walls with the various symbols suggested by Mr Han.
He showed all this to his grandmother in an attempt
to appease her, but she just shook her head and said
it wasn’t enough. He must abandon his plans for
number twenty-four. This was the one thing he
refused to do.

The machines arrived and were installed. Two
men, Colin and Ahmed, were hired to work alternate
shifts making change and guarding against van-
dalism. Siao-Te said nothing, and waited.

The first few months were uneventful; the trouble
began on the night that Colin caught someone break-
ing into one of the machines. Colin was a big man,
and sometimes he got rough. He got rough that night.
It was less than two hours before a gang of eight came
in with crowbars. Every machine was emptied, and
Colin was taken away in an ambulance.

There were demands for protection. Wayne refused
to pay. Three men came in and held Ahmed down
while a fourth smashed the simulated ride to Mars
into pieces.

Wayne kept all this a secret from his grandmother.
He didn’t want to frighten her, and he didn’t want to
hear her say “I told you so.” He hardly saw her, any-
way. He was always either in his office or at the police
station, trying to get them to do something. Siao-Te
spent most of her time in her bedroom, alone with
the voice in her head.

She didn’t need Zhang-Cho to tell her something
was wrong. She could see the worry in her grandson’s
eyes.

On a Wednesday night, at three minutes to mid-
night, eleven men in balaclavas rushed into the
restaurant. They had long knives as long as swords
and they had guns. Sammy Chong was knocked on
the head with the butt of a pistol. Wayne was slashed
by eleven knives before he was shot twice in the chest.
“Mrs Wu! Mrs Wu!”

She stumbled to the door. “What is it?”

“Your grandson killed! Masked men shoot him!”
Her eyes went blank and she collapsed. The waiter
was terrified the shock had killed her.

“Mrs Wu! Mrs Wu! Are you all right?” He grabbed
her wrist and felt for a pulse. He should never have
told her. He should have left it to someone else. Tears
streamed down his face. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs Wu!”

A cold wind swept up the stairway and into the
living room. The waiter’s hair flew into his eyes, tem-
porarily blinding him. A man’s voice thundered from
somewhere above him, “I HAVE SEEN HIM AND HE

IS NOT DEAD!” The old woman’s pulse leapt into
action beneath the waiter’s trembling fingers. She
opened her mouth and the thundering voice came
from her throat: “TAKE THE WOMAN TO HIM!”

The waiter screamed and ran, leaving the old
woman lying on the floor.

Siao-Te rubbed her eyes and sat up slowly. “Don’t
worry, my love,” the voice whispered, “I will help
you downstairs.”

She walked into the restaurant and into chaos.
Tables were overturned, glass was broken, and men
with notebooks were everywhere. Wayne’s beautiful
fish tank had been demolished. No one seemed to
notice the old woman until she paused in front of a
large red stain.

“Hey, get her away from there! How’d she get in
here, anyway?”

One of the kitchen staff explained that she was the
owner’s grandmother.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” one of the policemen told her.
“Hawkins here will drive you to the hospital.”

She shook her head uncomprehendingly, and
someone was dragged over to translate. She nodded
to the policeman named Hawkins. He took her arm
and led her towards the doorway, pausing while she
leaned over to pick up one of the tropical fish that
still flopped its tail on the carpet.

Wayne hovered at the edge of a cliff. He heard voices.
Many voices. Some shouted; some wept. Some called
to him in Chinese and some in English. “Come to us,”
they told him. “Be one of us.” He stepped off the edge
and floated gently downwards. “Down you come,
Wayne,” the voices whispered. “Down to us who were
forced from our bodies before our time. Down to us
who stalk the earth and seek revenge. Down to . . .”

The voices stopped. Wayne stopped as well. Some-
thing had caught him in mid-fall. It was a hand; he
was sure of that. He felt the fingers digging into his
shoulder. For a moment he hung suspended. Then
the hand tightened its grip and pulled him b^ck up,
to the edge of the cliff. A bed was waiting for him
there.

I t was three days before they let her see him. Even
then, they warned her through an interpreter not
to expect much. “You can go in and sit with him,”
they told her, “but don’t try to make him speak. He
needs his rest.”

Siao-Te hobbled into the room where her grandson
was wrapped up like a mummy and held together by
tubes connected to bottles of coloured liquid. She
stood by the side of his bed and looked down. His
breathing was shallow and his eyes were closed.
“Zhang-Cho,” she thought angrily, “look. what they
have done to your grandson. You, an honoured war-
rior and personal bodyguard to the emperor! You, a
fearsome demon of the netherworld! Do not tell me
you will stand for this!”

“NO!” the voice of Zhang-Cho thundered in her
head. “I WILL NOT!”

Unable to speak, unable to move, with massive
doses of drugs coursing through his system, Wayne’s
senses had never been more acute. He heard every-
thing. He saw everything there was to see without
even opening his eyes. He saw his grandmother now,

12 inlorzon** July 1992

standing beside his bed. And he saw the young man
standing behind her. He’d never seen anyone like
him.

The man’s hair was long and black and tied into a
knot upon his head. His beard was long also, and it
was trimmed to a point. And his clothes! Wayne
shook his head in amazement, though of course his
head never moved. He’d only seen robes like that in
a museum. Wayne puckered his lips to whistle in
appreciation (though his moilth never moved), but
then he thought better of it. The young man might
take it the wrong way. Whoever the guy was, he cer-
tainly didn’t seem in any mood to kid around. His
thick brows were furrowed with anger and his teeth
were bared in a snarl. Wayne could have sworn he
saw sparks flashing from the young man’s eyes, even
though the logical side of his brain was aware that
such a thing was impossible; he must he asleep and
dreaming. Still the guy was huge. Dream or not,
Wayne told himself, you’d have to be crazy to upset
a guy like that.

As the old woman stepped into the street outside the
hospital, the voice inside her head repeated for the
third time, “YES! I agree our grandson must be
avenged, but I am worried abqyJ>you. I will not let
you put yourself into danger.”

“What do I care about danger? I am an old woman,
and it is time for me to die.”

“No, you are still the little girl who rolled herself
into a ball with fear at the sound of a demon’s voice.”

“That little girl is dead. She died the day you left
the body of Wu Fung-Lao the farmer.”

“I will not let you do this.”

“Zhang-Cho, I will do what must be done, and if
you will not help me I will do it alone.”

The demon had no choice but to give in. “All right, ”
he said, “you shall have your vengeance.”

There were preparations to be made. Siao-Te
walked into the restaurant and asked the cashier for
money. When she told him how much she wanted,
he had to send a waiter to the bank. She made a mark
on the cashier’s receipt and took the money upstairs.
She went into her room and lit several sticks of
incense at the altar opposite the foot of her bed. She
drew a portrait of Zhang-Cho, which she mounted on
the wall. Then she drew a picture of a horse. She held
a match to it, and dropped it into a metal bowl with
flame and smoke seeming to pour from the animal’s
nostrils. Then she burned the money one note at a
time.

“Rest now, my darling,” Zhang-Cho told her. “Later
we will need all your strength.”

She lay down on her bed and closed her eyes while
Zhang-Cho went to equip himself.

“Mother?”

“Is that you, Mei-Lee?”

“Mother, you must not do this.”

“Mei-Lee, he is your son. Don’t you want ven-
geance?”

“No, Mother. He isn’t dead. He is going to live; I
made sure of that.”

“So it was you that caught him.”

“He had no preparation for death. He would have
become a demon.”

Siao-Te said nothing.

intprzono July 1992 13

“Mother, if you do what you are pJanning, you will
become a demon yourself.”

“Daughter, I am one already.”

Z hang-Cho returned that evening with every-
thing they needed. He had already seen the
gang’s headquarters; he would lead Siao-Te to
it.

The old woman rose from her hed, washed her face,
tied hack her hair, and stepped into her tiny shoes.
As she reached the street, Zhang-Cho told her one last
time that she did not need to do this. She ignored him
and kept- walking. Soon she turned into a dark alley-
way, walked past a sign reading “Keep Out” in both
English and Cantonese, and headed down a flight of
stairs. She stopped in front of a steel-reinforced base-
ment door. She knocked three times. A panel slid
back and a pair of eyes appeared. They crinkled in
amusement at the sight of the tiny woman. The door
opened.

“How can I help you, grandmother?” a man asked
her with mock politeness. He spoke Cantonese; the
dragon tattooed on his chest was clearly visible
beneath his thin cotton shirt.

“I am looking for someone.”

“You won’t find him here, grandmother.”

“I will look, just the same.”

Someone laughed and said, “Let her come in, then.”
The man who’d opened the door bowed as he let
her past, and then bolted the door. The place was
obviously an illegal drinking club; a bar ran along one
wall. There wasn’t much light; just a single bulb.

Siao-Te walked to the centre of the room and looked
around. She counted eleven men, all young. All big.
Most wore jeans and tee-shirts. Some wore leather
jackets. Several of them were sitting on stools at the
bar. Three sat around a table. The rest stood, glaring
at her. One, who couldn’t have been older than seven-
teen, spat at a spot on the floor only inches from the
old woman’s feet. Then he smiled and went back to
cleaning his fingernails with a long knife that was
more like a sword.

The twelfth man entered the room through a beaded
doorway. He was older than the others, maybe forty.
He wore a suit and a tie and a large jewelled ring.
“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Who let her in
here?”

Zhang-Cho whispered in Siao-Te’s ear, “This is the
man who ordered our grandson’s execution.”

The man beside the door shrugged. “She said she’s
looking for someone.”

“And I have found him,” Siao-Te said, staring at
the man in the suit.

The boy who’d been cleaning his fingernails gig-
gled.

“Shut up! All right, old woman. Just who the hell
are you and what do you want?”

“I come from The House of Wu restaurant, and what
I want is vengeance.”

Eleven knife blades glistened under the light pro-
vided by a single bulb. Eleven pairs of hands and feet
moved closer.

The man in the suit contemplated the tips of his
fingers. “I’m sorry, old woman. But you leave me no
choice.”

“NOW!” boomed the voice of Zhang-Cho. Siao-Te

opened her mouth and a gleaming sword rose from
the back of her throat , wielded by the arm of a giant.

O utside, the evening was mild, with just a hint
of a breeze, and though it was quite late, the
sun still hovered above the western horizon,
giving the sky a brilliant pink and orange glow. It was
the height of the summer tourist season, and the
streets of Soho were packed with people from around
the world. Three Germans were entering a pub, a
group of Japanese were stepping off a coach, an Arab
was hailing a taxi, and a married couple from Kansas
were trying to decide on a restaurant. Then one of the
West End musicals finished its evening performance
and even more people spewed out onto the streets.

In such a crowd, no one paid much attention to the
three men running frantically down the street. But
one second later, the theatre crowd stopped dead in
their tracks, the Germans ran back into the street, the
taxi hailed by the Arab smashed into a lamp-post, the
Japanese S'eached for their cameras, and no one said
a word except for the man from Kansas, who actually
said three: “Oh my Gawd!”

A man was charging down Shaftesbury Avenue on
horseback, a sword held between his teeth. His robes
were silk of imperial yellow, embroidered with
threads of solid gold. The last rays of the sun reflected
in his metal helmet and breastplate with such inten-
sity that it was painful to look at him. Still, no one
turned away. Every head turned to watch him. Every
eye devoured him. He was magnificent.

One of the three men tripped and fell. His head fell
away with one swooping stroke of the warrior’s sword
as the horse, breathing fire, leapt over him. A second
stroke sent another head rolling beneath the wheels
of a number 19 bus.

The next stroke removed the third man’s shirt. The
dragon on his chest clearly visible, he shoved a mes-
senger off his motor-cycle and roared away, closely
pursued by the giant on horseback.

“Golly,” said the woman from Kansas. She watched
the two of them turn right into a side street and then
right again into the congested traffic of Regent Street.

There was utter chaos as cars, buses and people did
their best to get out of the way. The horse leapt
effortlessly over those that didn’t. There was a roar
of triumph that could be heard for miles and a final
sweep of the gleaming sword.

The last severed head smashed through the window
of Hamley’s toy store and landed on the shoulder of
a giant teddy bear. The motor-cycle and its headless
rider didn’t stop until Oxford Gircus.

The horseman turned back and vanished into a
maze of side streets. The woman from Kansas ran to
the corner to watch him go. Later, she swore that he
became transparent and gradually faded from view.
Her husband took her back to their hotel to lie down.

The police were on the scene within seconds, but
found no trace of the man or his horse.

When Siao-Te got back to the restaurant, they had
to help her up the stairs. “Mrs Wu, what happened?
You’re covered in blood.” But she wouldn’t answer.

A doctor was called, and he said she was suffering
from shock and exhaustion. One of the waitresses
came to stay in the flat and take care of her.

14 in«er*ono July 1992

T he papers were full of varying eyew^itness
accounts of the mystery horseman, and the fact
that the police were linking the murders on
Shaftesbury Avenue with the apparent “gangland
revenge” slaying of nine men in a Soho basement.
Most had criminal records, either in Britain or in Hong
Kong, and each one had been beheaded. The first
policeman to enter the basement fainted at the sight
of nine severed heads impaled on empty lager bottles,
lined up in a row across the bar top. Strangely, none
of the many photographs taken of the horseman had
come out, but there was an artist’s impression of him
on every front page as well as on television.

The police were regular visitors to Wayne’s bed-
side. They showed him the artist’s impression of the
man seen riding around Soho on a fire-breathing
horse, and demanded to know who he was.

“I have no idea who he is. I’ve never seen him
before.” He’d forgotten about his dream.

“Wasn’t this a revenge killing, arranged by you?”
“How could I arrange it? I was unconscious.”
Finally, the doctors decided that Wayne was well
enough to go home. He arrived at the restaurant in a
taxi. Sammy helped him get upstairs.

The first thing he did was to look in on his grand-
mother. He’d heard she was ill; but he wasn’t prepared
for what he saw. She was a skeleton only loosely
covered by translucent flesh.

“Grandmother,” he whispered.

She didn’t need to open her eyes to see him. He
was thin and weak and scarred, and there were
stitches in his chest, but he would be all right.
“Wayne,” she said, “I have only struggled to hold this
body so that I would see you once more, and know
that you will be well again and not become a demon. ”
“What?” She’s rambling, he thought. She must have
a fever.

“The next time you die,” she whispered. “You must
be ready for it.”

He caught a glimpse of Siao-Te’s altar out of the
corner of one eye, and then he turned to stare at it
open-monthed. He knew that she had one in her room
and that she burned incense and left little offerings
there, but he’d never noticed the drawing pasted on
the wall. “Grandmother, who is this?”

She still didn’t open her eyes. “Your grandfather. ”
He frowned. “My grandfather? No ! The police came
to the hospital. They showed me pictures of this man.
He killed a dozen people! Who is he?”

“Help me to sit up.”

He gently pulled her forward and piled some pil-
lows behind her head. Paper. She was thin and light
as paper. Where had those mnscles of solid rock dis-
appeared to?

“Now, grandson. I will tell you everything.”

When the body of Wu Siao-Te wonld no longer hold
her spirit, Wayne apologized to the corpse for the fact
that he could not cut a hole in the roof for her, but
explained that he would open a window.

Three weeks later, on a cloudless and chilly autumn
night, Wayne knelt by the edge of the Serpentine and
shoved a tiny wooden boat across the water. It carried
two lit candles: one for his grandmother and one for
the demon.

Molly Brown makes her second appearance in Interzone
with the above piece. Her first, “Bad Timing” (issue 54),
won the British SF Association award as best short story of
1991. She has also sold stories to various original
anthologies of crime fiction and fantasy. She lives in Lon-
don, and we should be hearing a good deal more of her.

A year after the death of her little boy, Tina
Evans finds a message written on his
blackboard: NOT DEAD. This is her search for
the terrifying truth.

Paperback £4.99
Previously published under the
pseudonym Leigh Nichols

HEADLINE

FEATURE

intorzono July 1992 15

Fragments

Lawrence Watt-Evans

O nce upon a time, my mother told me, back in
the Dead And Gone, there was a land called
California, where the sun always shone, and
it was always warm, and it never rained; where the
people were beautiful, and everyone had a great big
car that could drive as fast as the wind, and there
were good roads everywhere to drive them on. And
in California was a place called Hollywood, or maybe
Holywood, and that was where all the dreams came
from.

And people didn’t dream their dreams alone in bed,
inside there heads, the way we do now; they watched
them unfold as coloured pictures, larger than life,
brighter than life, oh great silver screens that hung in
theatres, above the stage, or in magic boxes called
“videos” that they kept in their houses. And the
dreams always had happy endings, and they always
made sense - virtue triumphed, and evil was
punished, and true love won out in the end.

I’ve never been sure how to take my mother’s stories
— I mean, it all just sounds like a fairy tale, or an
allegory of some kind, but she didn’t seem to mean
it that way. Even when I asked her straight out, she
insisted that California was real, in the Dead And
Gone, and Hollywood was real — but she changed the
story, said that they didn’t really make dreams there,
they made films, or movies, or videotapes, or televi-
sion, and when I asked her what all those things meant
she couldn’t explain.

They were all just other names for dreams, she said.
And maybe Hollywood wasn’t exactly real real, she
would say, it was all sort of fake, but it wasn’t made
up, and then she would get confused, or I would.

So maybe dreams used to be different, I don’t know .

I asked my mother once what happened to California,
and she said she didn’t know. I asked her if it was
still there, just all ruined, and she said she didn’t
know. It might have fallen into the sea, she said.

She didn’t know.

I was reading a book we found — it still had the back
cover and almost all the pages. I don’t read very well,
because I’ve never had time to work at it, and there
isn’t all that much to read anyway, but I read this
book. It talked about a place called Atlantis that sank
into the sea.

I asked my mother if Atlantis was another name for
California.

She burst out crying, and wouldn’t talk to me for
hours.

When she would talk to me again, she told me that
California was real, and Atlantis wasn’t; that Califor-
nia was still there fifty years ago, and Atlantis had
been gone for at least two thousand; that there are lots
of made-up places that sank, like Lemuria and Mu
and Numenor, and Atlantis is just one of them.

I don’t understand any of it. Why would people
make up places like that? Why are there so many? If
Atlantis wasn’t real, how could it have sunk two
thousand years ago?

I asked my mother if she was ever in California
before it sank, and she got angry again.

“It didn’t sink,” she said. “Or maybe it did.”

She wouldn’t say if she’d ever been there.

e found videotapes today. Videotapes are
brittle black box shapes.

I though videotapes were a kind of
dream, buf my m other says these black things are vid-
eotapes.

They aren’t dreams; they’re just black plastic. They
don’t seem to be much use; they aren’t strong enough
to build anything. They’re shiny, though.

We were taking apart a car, and my mother yelled at
us.

“Not that one!” she said. “That’s a fifty-six shevvie,
it might be the last one in the world!”

I told her we needed hoses and pipes, and steel
springs for weapons, and wheels, and that we wanted
the oil to burn for heat, and she said, “Yes, that’s fine,
but not that one! Can’t you find any others?”

Lindsey and I didn’t see what difference it made,
but we decided we could let my mother have one car
for herself. There are plenty of cars, though most of
them have a lot more pieces missing.

When we left her there, she was sitting inside it,
holding the wheel thing and talking to herself.

When Lindsey first found Stuart he tried to rape her,
but we didn’t mind, really. Anybody would have, in
that situation. She ran away from him, and we went
back together and talked to him. We figured we could
probably trade with him - just about any time we find
someone new there are things we have that they want,
and things they have that we want.

All Stuart said he wanted was sex with Lindsey.

We thought it over, but Lindsey didn’t like him very
much, so we said we didn’t think so.

But I could see he had a lot of good things - he had

16 inloPKone July 1992

aluminium pans, and lights that were much brighter
than ours. So I asked if he would like to meet my
mother — with us as chaperones, on neutral ground,
of course, in case she didn’t like him, either.

But she did like him. She sent us both away almost
at once, and we walked off, leaving the two of them
sitting on a block of concrete, talking about computers.
Old people all seem to know about computers, but
none of them can explain very well what they were
for, and I’ve never figured it out. There are a lot of things
from the Dead And Gone that are like that; it makes
it very hard to understand the old people, sometimes.

We had a computer once, but the battery died when
I was a baby.

My mother lived at Stuart’s place for months. She
liked it there, with the aluminium pans to cook in
and the lights that were bright enough to read by.

“He’s got a generator,” she told us. I don’t know if
it was true. I never saw it.

Lindsey and I didn’t move in there with them; we
liked having our own private place, and Stuart and
my mother liked having their own private place. We
didn’t have bright lights run by a generator, we just
had old car batteries that kept our old lights glowing,
but that was enough. And I cooked in the same pots
I always had.

We didn’t see Stuart that often, so it took some time
before we realized how irritated he was getting.

When I saw his hand was bloody, I asked how it
happened.

“I hit a wall,” he said.

I looked at his hand.

I’d seen people hit walls before; when we were with
the Chicago fribe there was a man who hit walls when
things went wrong. I looked at Stuart’s hand, and I
knew he hadn’t hit anything just once.

“Are you and Mom getting along okay?” I asked.

He looked at me sideways, like I’d just shown I was
smarter than he thought.

“No,” he said. I nodded.

“I thought you two would have fun together, talking
about the Dead And Gone. And the other thing, of
course.”

“We did,” Stuart said. “Really, we did. But she
won’t talk about anything else.”

I blinked, and thought about that.

“What else is there?” I asked.

M y mother came to find us. She was crying.

Stuart was packing to go; he said she could
have the old place, he'd find a new one. She
wasn’t invited to come with him. He would leave the
aluminium pans, too.

I went to talk to him - “man to man," my mother
called it.

“Georgie,” he said when he saw me. "1 thought sht;
might send you.”

1 nodded.

“Well, it won’t do any good, but 1 don’t mind talking
to you,” he said, as he heaved bundles onto his c;art.
“Then why are you going?” I askinl.

"Because 1 can’t stand listtaiing to her any mon!,"
he told me. “Ihicause all slu; talks about is the Dead
And Goiu!.”

“Well, what else should she talk about?” I asked,
puzzled.

“Well, how about what’s yet to come?” he asked,
pushing the bundles neatly into place.

“What do you mean? Nothing’s left to come.”

“What about tomorrow?” he asked.

“What about it? It’ll be just like today.”

“Will it? Why?”

“Because. . .”

I didn’t have an answer. It just always had been.
Ever since I was born, everything had been the same.
Oh, the weather changed, it was cold in the winter
and hot in the summer, sunny some days and rainy
on others; I grew up; some days hunting was good,
some days it was poor; but nothing really changed.

“Georgie,” Stuart said, “Your mother saw a lot of
movies as a kid, and I think she remembers every
single one of them, but she never got the point.”

“What point?”

“The people in the movies never did what your
mother dees,” he said. “They never sat around waiting
for life to happen to them. They went out and made
things happen.”

“But that was in the Dead And Gone,” I said.
“Dreams were different then.”

He looked at me, and it was a funny look, as if he
thought I’d been hurt or something.

“No,” he said. “The world was different then, all
right — but people were the same, and dreams were
the same. "Those are two things that really don’t
change.” He pulled some straps tight across his cart.
“People change the world with their dreams, but
people don’t change, and dreams don’t change.”

“No, my mother told me,” I said. “People watched
dreams together, she said.”

He made a face.

“That’s what she does now," he said. "She sits
there, watching the old dreams in her head and telling
me all about them.” He sighed.

“Georgie,” he said, "I want my on-n dreams, nei\-
dreams.” He picked up the pulling bar.

“I guess it's because you’re from before.” I said.

He left.

I didn’t tell my mother what Stuart had said; I just
told her he was gone. She cried for a while.

Dreams don't change the world. My mother has
plenty of dreams. I don't, but she does.

Sometimes she sits in her car, talking to people who
aren’t there, pretending it's going down the road as
fast as the wind.

Cars don't run any more. My mother says it's
because there isn't any gasoline, but I don’t think
that's why. I think it's because the Dead And Gone is
dead and gone. All the old dreams and the old magic
are dead, and we need to li\’e in the here and now.

My mother tries to live in the Dead And Gone, but
she c:an't. She wants to li\’e in California. 1 think.
Stuart tried to live somewhere else. too. I guess -
sonujphua! that's ne\'er tixisted.

Atlantis, ma\'be.

But most people lixi; here and now. 1 do. l.iiulsex
doi\s. (i)ur baby dotes - wt; luimed lier She\’\ ie. to
plttase my mother.

Really, you knov\', it's ii good world, a x tumg world.

VVIi\' vx’oidd wt; want to i:lumgt! it? •

July 1992 17

The Cult of Loving Kindness

P aul Park is a complex character.

His life appears to be shaped by
disorder and ruled by snap decisions.
One day, bored with his steady job and
desperate to finish his first novel, he
packed his bags and went travelling.
Park is a now-you-see-him-now-you-
don’t sort of character. The sort of
person who has a great story to tell.

We met shortly before Christmas of
last year, by the Country & Western
section of a large Oxford Street record
store (his choice). He would be wear-
ing a green duffle coat and carrying a
rucksack.

The actual setting for the interview
was to be chosen when we met. This
is a man whose novels explore religion
and the negative effects of coloniza-
tion, the impossibility of true com-
munication; a man who has travelled
extensively through Asia and Africa,
learning about different cultures and
spirituality. The only place open and
quiet enough for the interview was
Burger King.

Paul Park is a tall, square-jawed
American with neat blond hair and
small Lennon specs. His physique, a
legacy of his years as a squash profes-
sional and health club manager, looked
oddly out of place in the tacky, glitzed-
up restaurant, with its piped Christmas
carols and overweight clientele.

Two of Park’s novels have been pub-
lished in the UK: the first two parts of
his “Starbridge Chronicles,” Soldiers
of Paradise and Sugar Rain. His other
books, the final part of the Starbridge
trilogy. The Cult of Loving Kindness,
and a fourth novel. Turn Away Turn
Back, are scheduled to follow.

Park prefers the term speculative
fiction to science fiction in categoriz-
ing his novels. “Actually, I think
fiction is a good term,” he laughs. “I
don’t really think that fiction should
be ghettoized because it’s about a cer-
tain subject matter. Essentially, the
only difference is in settings. Science
fiction or speculative fiction is such an
enormous genre, but it doesn’t say any-
thing of what a book’s about or what
its themes are. So as long as you’re
going to have a label that really doesn’t
tell you anything, you ought to have
the most general label possible.

“I would love it if there was no such
thing as genre writing, because — at
least in the US - everything is so
divided according to how it is mar-
keted that you’re missing out on a lot

18 interzone July 1992

of people who would respond to your
work the best. On the other hand, I
have a lot of friends who write more
general fiction; their books come out
and they just die because there’s such
a big market and there’s no reason to
buy it.”

He identifies with writers like Gene
Wolfe, Kim Stanley Robinson and Jim
Morrow. “There’s a philosophical
break between writers who think ^at
writing science fiction is different from
writing any other kind of fiction.
Essentially, the ordinary literary val-
ues take away from sf writing because
there should be something pure about
the essence of a science-fiction idea
that is changed or deluded if you bring
in the techniques appropriate to other
kinds of mainstream writing.”

B oth Soldiers of Paradise and Sugar
Rain combine science/speculative
fiction and fantasy, and concern the
revolt against the royal leaders of the
city-state of Charn. In them. Park often
uses metaphor to parallel the decaying
state of the world today. They are sub-
tly political books, with environmen-
tal and sociological messages hidden
between their lines. It comes as no sur-
prise to learn that Paul Park grew up
during the 1960s.

“I was a little young to have my polit-
ical consciousness shaped during that
decade, but certainly my social consci-
ence was,” he says. “When I was grow-
ing up in the 60s, if you adopted that
badge of long hair, dressed in denims,
listening to rock ’n’ roll, smoking dope
and doing drugs, it meant that almost
everybody in the country was your
enemy. I remember so vividly going
into a restaurant and realizing that
everybody hated me, and almost
rejoicing in that, taking some strength
from it.

“So there was a hopefulness in that
part of it, and another kind of thinking
- which I don’t think people growing
up nowadays have — which is: I really,
genuinely thought that when I was my
age now, 37, the world would be an
incredibly different place, and there
wouldn’t be any governments or
armies or wars or marriages. None of
that would exist because the people
who were interested in doing those
things would all have died and all the
new people coming up would want to
do something else.”

He pauses for breath, briefly. “I

remember having that belief change
around 1972, 1973. I picked up some-
one hitch-hiking who had the whole
paraphernalia: long hair, denims, the
jacket sort of ripped up. And this guy
was a jerk, a total idiot, and not only
that but he was practically a Republi-
can. He was a racist, a bigot, a sexist.
It was like he was wearing the uniform
but he had betrayed it.

“In 1972, in the US, you were on a
wave generated by your own crazy,
drug-induced frame of mind. We
always thought that people were going
to push you forward. At first it was just
these small places, then these values
were spreading in the community. The
Vietnam War was over, people had
rejected it, and the world was chang-
ing. Then it seemed to dry up. It was
like a recession, and it all dried up from
behind you. It was as if you were left
on a beach - now you’re just an old
hippie.”

Park speaks intensely, moulding
and remoulding sentences as he does
so. As he talks, he stares at an imagi-
nary point some 45 degrees to his right,
where he perhaps shapes a visual
incarnation of the thought process.

H e was never a compulsive reader
when he was younger, nor was he
a science-fiction fan. Surprisingly, he
shied clear of books by contemporary
American authors. “It’s partly because
American living writers, especially
famous American living writers, are
celebrities, so you see interviews with
them on TV all the time. And I would
think, ‘These guys are idiots.’ They
could never possibly write anything
that I’d be interested in. But I would
always warm to people who were
safely dead and who I could invest
with all kinds of posthumous dignity
and wisdom ...” he pauses and good
looks,” and laughs.

The story goes that he wrote Soldiers
of Paradise while travelling through
Asia during 1983-84, supposedly in
notebooks and on loose pieces of
paper. You get this impression of him
stealing sheets of loo paper from Indian
B&Bs, then scribbling feverishly away
on sun-baked street corners. All very
spontaneous.

“Well, no.” It’s a nice little story.
“And it’s not entirely untrue. I’d
been interested in writing for a while.
I had been living in New York and I’d
written a non-sf novel that I tried to

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sell and hadn’t really known how to
go about it — and it wasn’t very good
anyway. That was in the late 70s.”

An unpublished first novel. The
stuff that romance is made of. What
was it about?

“It was about a young man who has
a religious conversion and goes on a
week-long retreat in an Anglican
monastery in upstate New York. He
has a nervous breakdown while there,
and has the illusion that he can read
minds. And there are events happen-
ing around him, some of which are
innocent and some of which are
strange. He weaves these together
through his paranoia into a web of con-
spiracy. I’ve cannibalized the best bits,
stripped it for parts. It was more
important for me to write it than for
the result.”

The man is obsessed with religion.
His books, even that first attempt, all
take in the subject in some form. Often,
though, he seems to be ridiculing the
similarly obsessive behaviour and
thoughts of his religious characters.

“It is a real theme of mine,” he
admits, “though it’s not exactly true to
say I’m not enamoured with it. I don’t
consider myself an atheist. One of the
things about writing is that it doesn’t
really occur to you what your obses-
sions are until you actually see what
you’re writing about. Religion is one
of those parts of living, our world, our
culture, and the impulse for it comes

out of a very pure, necessary, beautiful
part in human beings.

“Your suffering, your joys, make up
some kind of pattern — it’s not just ran-
dom chaos. Also, religious figures start
with that same outpouring from their
hearts, and that’s what’s interesting to
me. What I often write about is how,
when that pure instinct comes out into
the world, it is subjected to the pres-
sures of the world in heartbreaking
ways and it becomes changed. It goes
off in different directions that are com-
pletely alien to the impulse of it. It
becomes about power, money, and all
those worldly subjects.”

Park subscribes to an amalgam of
religions, trying to take the best parts
from each. “Most religions join at a
certain point,” he says. “When I was
in Asia, I would talk to these very holy
people and they would be not only
extremely learned about Christianity,
but also extremely respectful of West-
ern saints or Jesus — consider them
great teachers or great spiritual beings.
It’s something that we in the Western
world could learn from.

“When you reduce it down, so many
religions are talking about the same
thing, but looking at it from different
points of view. I have a difficulty — or
maybe it’s just a prejudice - in that
when you drive around in the East, you
meet a lot of Westerners living in
Buddhist temples and they’re going
around with begging bowls. I have a

reaction against that because I feel it’s
very hard to jump cultures in a credible
way. As long as it’s true that all relig-
ions end up at the same place, you
might as well stay within your own
culture and civilization because that’s
the one where you’re going to be able
to go deeper.”

You get the feeling that Park might
have been dragged kicking to church
and Sunday school as a child. It trans-
pires that his parents were both agnos-
tic. His father is a physicist and his
mother teaches literature. Although
she taught her son about Milton, Dante
and Bunyan, all the deeply religious
writers, “she doesn’t consider herself
a religious person.” Park continues;
“There is an influence there. It teaches
you to have a striving that you associ-
ate with your art. But it fits in very well
with writing science fiction. A better
distinction than thinking about clas-
sifying sf writers in terms of militaris-
tic or hard sf or cyberpunk is to look
at which are guided by a certain kind
of idealism or cynicism.”

Given Park’s political background
and the way that comes over in his
books, he seems to be guided by equal
parts of both.

He agrees, and adds, “1 had a talk
with Jim Morrow about this, because
he writes obsessively about religion
and never misses a chance to lamlaast
it and expose all its hypocrises. And
he considers himself a spiritual person.

iiii<^rxoiit‘ July 1992 19

I think if you take these things seri-
ously, there’s a tremendous outrage in
you that’s generated by seeing how
religion is perverted and destroyed,
which certainly translates into my
work. If I were reading my work from
outside and thinking, ‘What’s Paul
Park’s view of these things?’, I would
say that he’s a guy who had a Catholic
boyhood and is now working against
it - but that’s not true at all.”

W hen Paul Park set off for Asia in
the early 80s, disillusioned with
a safe job, the same home and a lengthy
relationship, he had written one chap-
ter of Soldiers of Paradise but could
get no further.

“I had been writing the first chapter
obsessively and it’s very different from
the rest. It was, by its nature, very
difficult to do, and it wasn’t a voice I
could sustain for a whole novel. In
some ways it’s the part of all my books
that I like best, because I felt free from
all the traditional ideas of storytelling.
I wasn’t thinking in terms of a sequ-
ence of events or of causes and effects,
because the storyteller in that chapter
is looking at it as a series of images.
Images that had an evocative meaning.

“But at a certain point I had written
it into the ground. I couldn’t figure out
what to do with it, yet I knew this was
the book I wanted to write. It was float-
ing, falling in on itself, and my own
life was too. I was in despair and my
squash game wasn't getting any better.
So I went to Asia and I didn’t look at
it for four or five months, but then I
picked it up and started to write again.

“There’s a point at the end of the first
chapter where it makes a complete
right angle; when I look at it I think,
‘Well, it’s my first novel, it’s obviously
a flaw.’ But I’m fond of it as a reflection
of this mental process I’d been
through. I had this thing that was self-
contained; it was a jewel. And then
when I started to write the book again,
it was about finding a whole other new
creation to enclose that jewel.”

He finished the book while making
a haphazard journey through India. As
he describes the events, it becomes
obvious that his mind was far from
together at the time. “After a while I
was running out of steam. The book
was completed and I’d promised
myself I’d come back when it was
done. Two things happened: one, it
was in notebooks, and I began to get
paranoid that something was going to
happen to it - especially the way I
travelled; and, two, I found I was run-
ning out of the energy it takes to travel
in the way that I wanted, I was losing
energy and getting physically sick and
tired. I was getting panicked, I was very
broke, and I wanted to see whether I
could come back and sell this book.”

At this time came another of the
decisive turning points in the Life and
Times of Paul Park, as exemplified by

the meeting with the Republican hitch-
hiker. These moments, by the way,
make for compulsive listening. When
the piped Christmas .carols stopped
and Park continued talking in the loud
tones beloved of American people, you
sensed that half of Burger King was
tuning in.

“I was in Goa, and I met this German
guy. He was the kind of guy you some-
times run into in India — a Westerner
who’s completely cut off all his ties
from his own country and people. He
was a junkie, he had no money, and he
lived by doing occasional drug deals
and stealing money from Western
travellers. A terrible, broken-down
shell of a human being. He was full of
contempt for Indians, but he did have
this amazing marijuana.

“We were smoking that and I was
looking at him and trying to talk to him,
and thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is#ne:
I’m looking at myself. I could have this
same intense negative energy that ema-
nates from every orifice of this man.’
So I staggered out into the night, but I
couldn’t find the rented shack I was
staying at. After a while I gave up, and
was only trying to find the town it was
in. Then I gave up on that and was try-
ing to find the beach.

“After a while I lost the beach and
was dragging around in somebody’s
paddy field and the dogs were coming.
The whole thing was rapidly evolving
into this absurd nightmare. Eventually
I found the beach and I found a little
wooden hut where fishermen had
dragged up these big wooden boats. I
dragged myself into the sand between
the boats and I woke up at probably 11
o’clock in the morning, very hot, and
the straw roof was only a few feet above
my head. A very bright sun was penet-
rating through, and I was hit by these
needles of light.

“I had no memory of where I was -
not even which country I was fn. I was
thinking, ‘My God, what’s going on?
I’m not a kid any more; I’m 30 years
old and my friends are in law school
already and here I am lying in the sand
and I don’t even know what country
I’m in.’ Slowly everything came back
to me. I remembered I’d written this
book, I remembered everything.”

I t took three years. before Soldiers of
Paradise was published. Park
returnied to New York and got his job
back as the health club manager. He
edited the book into shape and began
touting it around editors, publishers
and agents. It was only when one
editor informed him that he had writ-
ten a science-fiction novel that his
efforts took on any coherent direction.

So what was it like when the shiny,
hardbound edition of his first book was
slipped through his letterbox by some
unsuspecting postperson, to thud
resoundingly on the hallway carpet?
“I always find ways of ruining things

like that,” he laughs. “I had this recur-
ring nightmare for months before the
book was published, where I get it in
the mail and first of all it’s not a hard-
cover at all, it’s a cheap trade paper-
back. I pick it up and it falls out of its
binding. And I look at the title page
and it’s not really mine - it's translated
from some Slavic language. And I turn
over the back and the picture’s obvi-
ously not me; it’s some guy with a
leather jacket on, with a cigarette,
standing in Red Square. So when the
book actually came, I was so relieved.”

Soldiers of Paradise is essentially
about the conflict between people’s
dreams of freedom and the reality of
the freedom that society allows them.
Park uses the inhabitants of Charn and
the techniques of sf and fantasy writing
to bring across these far-more-real con-
cerns.

“I have a sister who is autistic,” he
explains, “and she has a very different
and individual way of making the
world work for her, and that was cer-
tainly part of thie influence behind the
book — the heartbreaking integrity
somebody like that can have. In terms
of a theme, it’s about the different
kinds of freedom, different kinds of
slavery and oppression, and how they
mix. In oppression there is a kind of
freedom generated, and in freedom
there’s a certain impulse that drags you
down even when you’re trying to do
something noble or credible.”

A cynical view, some ihight say.

“Well, that’s my own feeling. That’s
why I don’t consider myself as a polit-
ical writer, because I very much dis-
trust people with plans, people with
ideas — even if I agree with the idea.
That’s how everything bad starts —
somebody with a plan about how
everything’s going to be great tfying to
get everybody on the bandwagon. If I
have any mild sense of making the
world better, that’s not how to do it.
You do it in yourself first, then gradu-
ally there’s some kind of critical mass
that happens when people achieve
some kind of contentment.”

T he science-fiction genre is a strange
medium for such political and
ideological viewpoints. There is a
danger that purist readers might con-
fuse the messages.

“I don’t think of my work as teaching
anybody anything,” says. Park. “My
aim in the trilogy was to — this sounds
stupid - hold a mirror to the world and
to try to create a new reality that gave
a taste of the same complexity and mix
of good and evil and pure and per-
verted as our own. Writing as an art
doesn’t mix well with overt moral writ-
ing or leftist politics or any of the
things I do believe in.

“Morally, the world is a complicated
place. As soon as you start forging a
message for it, you’re lost, and you’re
just like one of those religious leaders

20 iniprKono July 1992

who has an idea and finds it perverted
or changed,”

The second and third books in the
Starbridge Chronicles continue the
ideas begun in the first, set in the same
world, but the trilogy is essentially
only loosely related.

“Sugar Rain is a much more plot-
centred work,” he says. “When I con-
ceived the series of three books^ the
only way I could do it, and make it
seem as though I wasn’t repeating
myself, was to make them structurally
different. The first one is more a novel
of characters; it’s about this world,
these themes. I would invent a plot that
would move your camera from one
part to the other. It suffers from the
weaknesses and strengths of that kind
of book.

“It’s about love — a man and a woman
having very different kinds of experi-
ences; finding some way of coming
together in an extremely unsatisfying
and tentative way. I look back at my
books and try to figure out what’s
wrong with them. With that one, the
characters are being pushed by outside
events too much. They’re at the mercy
of forces other than their own. The
book is about how they respond to
those forces. The problem with that is
that the characterization becomes less
important.”

Paul Park has an obvious negative
sentiment about love. Here, his charac-
ters never achieve the romantic bond
they seek; earlier in the conversation,
he lumped marriage in with wars,
governments and armies as one of the
evils of the world. Does he believe in
love?

“Oh, yeah. I’m very romantic. But I
feel tentative about showing it. What I
hate in books is when you have a man
and woman together, you have them
doing certain things; they have some-
thing in common and they’re sexually
attracted to each other. Love, for me,
is so much more tentative than that.
You shine a light on it and there’s
nothing there. I don’t think love hap-
pens except in a needy, desperate or
twisted way until you have a kind of
independence. It didn’t seem approp-
riate for the characters in Sugar Rain
to have a big romantic resolution. It
seemed more realistic to give them a
sense of potential.”

Of The Cult of Loving Kindness, he
says, “I wanted again to write a plot-
orientated book where the plot and the
characters were parts of the same thing.
It’s a man-and-a-woman story again,
but this time they come together tenta-
tively then split apart. They’re drawn
apart by the chaotic forces of the world.
It’s about their own moral choices and
also about what happens when indi-
vidual human faith comes into contact
with history or mythology or destiny.
Those forces are so much stronger and
so much more paissionate that human
beings are touched by them.”

J ust as the reader can tire of the same
characters in the same series of
books, so Park has probably tired of
them. The “Starbridge Chronicles” is
at least out of his system. What began
as an exorcism has finally been exor-
cised. So Turn Away Turn Back, due
for publication in 1993, marks a new
direction in his writing.

“I think it’s the only pure science-
fiction book I’m going to write,” he
says. “It’s an attempt to write about
another kind of consciousness diffe-
rent to human consciousness. That’s a
great sf subject, and it’s not something
I’ve seen handled in a credible way.
This book is about an l\merican colony
on a distant planet where there’s a race
of aliens. There’s a whole class of these
aliens, rich and poor, and they’ve
essentially cut themselves off from
their own culture, their own roots,
even their own way pf thinking. ,
“They think of ; themselves as
human, even taking medication that
changes the brain patterns to repro-
duce the mental experiences of
humans. One such created human is
taken hostage by terrorists, along with
an official from the British Embassy,
and her supply of drugs is cut off. For
the process of the novel she’s gradually
reverting to her alien state and her
point of view is changing. The other
point of view is the man’s. They’re hav-
ing the same experiences, but their per-
ceptions are different. It’s a genuine
way of exploring what it is to have dif-
ferent thought processes.”

Of course, it goes far deeper than
that. Park sees the book as having four
levels: on the effects of colonization;
on the confrontation of alien with
human consciousness; on the different
languages that men and women speak;
and, lastly, as an adventure story.

Whatever, he has no pretensions to
literary greatness.

“It doesn’t help to think about it in
those terms. I’m really interested in
trying to make my books as good as
they can be, as ambitious as they can
be. I don’t ever want to make any con-
cessions to the market or to the audi-
ence. I take my work very seriously,
but the concept of literary greatness
seems like a bogus one.”

At the moment. Park is plotting a dif-
ferent and still more overtly religious
novel. “In India and in Tibet there’s a
legend that Jesus visited these places
and lived there. This legend has been
adopted by bogus, pseudo-scientific,
New Age writers in the US, who are
interested in proving this. But no one
has approached it fictionally, which
should be very interesting.

“I don’t want to write it like an his-
torical book. I want to write it about
those themes and that subject, but I
want to write it more universal, more
modern-day. I want to do a kind of 60s/
70s narrative — the young hippie kid
going East, having his mind opened.”

Sounds almost autobiographical.
And perhaps that is the best move he
could make. For while Soldiers of
Paradise and Sugar Rain are often
beautifully written, exploring chal-
lenging themes and casting out many
of the sf/fantasy conventions, it would
be almost impossible for them to match
the spontaneity, the emotion and the
sheer, bloody-minded adventure of
Paul Park’s own offbeat life story.

Interaction

Continued from page 5

Dear Editors:

This may seem a little eccentric but I’m
sure you have your fair share of eccen-
trics. I decided to write so that I could
express my grief at the sad loss of a
great science-fiction mind, Isaac
Asimov.

It’s difficult to know what to say . . .
“ ‘And that is all’, said Dr Calvin, ris-
ing. ‘I saw it from the beginning, when
the poor robots couldn’t speak, to the
end, when they stand between man-
kind and destruction. I will see no
more. My life is over. Y ou will see what
comes next.’ ”

Tim Barker
Chongqing, China

intorzono July 1992 21

Spring Rain

John Meaney

A kazawa-sensei knelt in the seiza position, a
gaunt, straight-backed figure in the bare
1 . shadows of the room, and switched on the
small cordless terminal.

“Ohayo gozaimasu, O-sensei.” The machine used
the honorific in its customary manner; it disquieted
him as always.

Only one incoming message, from his son, Tenka.
Bright yellow kanji glowed in the dimness, mysteri-
ous runes cast by some kami. He felt his heart sink,
the sour bilious sensation of fear clutching at his
stomach, as the meaning of the message became clear,
almost Western in its directness.

Honoured father, it read. Our 7GL project nears
completion. Called Miyamoto, we named it after the
Sword Saint because it is a master of strategy. It has
coached our company kendo team, with some suc-
cess, and has given good advice on corporate matters
of limited importance. Now it is ready for greater chal-
lenges, and would be honoured if you would teach it
go, ten days from now . . . The message concluded with
the normal politenesses of a dutiful son.

His own son! He loved and was proud of Tenka,
more than he could ever say, and was being repaid
with this disgraceful challenge. For it was a challenge,
the formal request for “teaching” as clear in intent as
a knight laying down his gauntlet in medieval Europe.
No matter that the challenger was not a man.

Akazawa, fifty-eight years old, fifth-dan karate mas-
ter and sixth-dan go master, was scared. As his
strength and agility faded with age, he could no longer
hide his true nature. As he had been at school — small
and weak, the terrified victim of merciless bullies -
so he was becoming again. He could surely avoid
physical confrontation, but not a board game. Yet go
is more than a board game; it is a complex battlefield
which reveals the depths of a man’s spirit. In his heart
of hearts, lay the certainty that he was a coward.

He rose to his feet, feeling his age in his joints,
though an onlooker would have thought him graceful.
Breathing deliberately to reduce his anxiety, he
walked slowly to the kitchen. He prepared a small
bowl of tuna. Then he slid open the back door and
stepped outside, putting the bowl down on the
smooth wooden verandah.

In the grey light preceding dawn, the Zen garden
was an ocean surrounding craggy islands. The neigh-
bours’ small cat, its ginger and white fur a mottled
grey patchwork in the dimness, came scrambling over
the fence from next door, and immediately stuck his

head in the bowl and ate voraciously, eyes squeezed
shut in pleasure.

“Good morning, Koichi-san.” Akazawa’s soft voice
held the accent of rural Hokkaido.

Only the lapping sound of Koichi’s eating, and a
low solitary birdsong, hung in the fresh silence. The
mountain slope was black against the pre-dawn glow.
Akazawa breathed the pure clear air, as the sky light-
ened from grey through turquoise to blue, and the sun
rose up over Mount Akan. Time to train. He performed
his usual warm-up, basic stances and hurdler’s
stretch, then began to practice the powerful direct
moves of sochin kata. For an hour and a half he pushed
himself, striving against invisible opponents over and
over again. The little cat watched him dispassion-
ately.

A fterwards, having showered and eaten break-
fast, he changed into Western clothes - grey
>. suit, white shirt, black tie - and left the house.
In the village he could hire a taxi to take him to the
station. He left the outer doors open, to give the rooms
an airing, and hoped it would not rain.

He enjoyed the ride to Tokyo on the shinkansen
bullet-train. Hokkaido island dwindled behind him
as the train flew its induction rail fifteen metres above
the sparkling ocean. Too soon, they were over land
again. For the rest of the five-hundred-mile journey
he peered out at the changing landscape. Finally, the
train slid to a halt in the terminus, in the heart of
Tokyo city.

The crowds! The enclosed plaza, spotlessly clean,
with a multicoloured confusion of signs and adver-
tisements in the air above head height, was teeming
with people. Grimly, Akazawa pushed his way
through the mob, as a migraine tightened its grip upon
his forehead.

At a sales booth, he purchased a cheap pocket
guide, with mono graphics and a cheap voice synth.
He keyed in the address of his son’s employers, and
followed the machine’s directions.

The building was a tall glass block, gleaming in the
afternoon sun, part of a row of monoliths, every one
a corporate headquarters. He tried to imagine Tenka
at work in there - with teams of obsequious subordi-
nates, a graceful secretary perhaps, all in some
labyrinthine lair of technology. His son’s way of life
was a closed book to him. Impossible to talk to Tenka
now.

He took a deep breath of clean air, remembering

22 inlorzoiio July 1992

stinking fumes and gritty paper masks from his youth,
then he turned and walked away. He walked aim-
lessly, carried along by the crowd, mostly in a steady
flow, sometimes in a turbulent jumble. Random
motion led him to a gleaming enclosed shopping mall,
where the open front of a bioelectronics store bec-
koned. In its doorway, as in other shops, sat a grimy
beggar.

A squat white security robot glided over to the old
beggar, Without physical coercion, the old man was
persuaded to move on. As he shuffled away, a group
of dark-uniformed students passed by, several of them
dropping coins into the old man’s cup. Akazawa
could only stand and watch. The robot left the other
beggars alone. Perhaps they were allowed to beg for
some period of time, before being asked to leave. All
of them were male , all shabbily dressed, some filthy.

Feeling helpless, he entered the bright cavern of
the store. Two pretty assistants bowed, and one of
them handed him a small white chrysanthemum.
Holding the flower carefully, he walked around the
quiet shop. The gleaming black boxes conveyed
simplicity and strength. Some of the devices bore
descriptions which he could not understand. He sat
down at a small table which held a go-playing bio-
comp. Reading the instructions, he ignored the mic-
rophone and used the keyboard. A fine grid of lines,
nineteen by nineteen, appeared on the display.

He ignored the option for handicapping, and chose
to play black, moving first. A black disk appeared on
one of the grid’s intersection points. The game had
begun.

White stones and black stones blossomed on the
screen as play evolved. Armies were created, ter-
ritories established, prisoners taken, territories cap-
tured. He established small black armies with multi-
ple “eyes” — areas into which White (his opponent
now bore a name) conld not move. .Invulnerable
armies, but they do not move. More stones must be
played to gain territory: surround the enemy to defeat
him.

As the war progressed, he hardly noticed the quiet
group of onlookers which had gathered round. His
controlling territories grew, but expansion became
more difficult as White chopped at him from all sides.
Gradually, White began to make unexpected gains.

The game moved into its second hour. Sweat lay
on his forehead. White continued to cut into his
forces. Suddenly, he could no longer see White’s pat-
tern of play. There was no coherence or artistic form,
but a mechanical hacking like blows rained upon his
body. No way to become one with his opponent’s
strategy, to flow with it and then subvert it. Defeat
followed swiftly, like darkness crashing down around
his head.

Slowly, blinking, he became aware of the people
standing around him. A short squat man in an expen-
sive black suit bowed to him, and all of the onlookers
broke into soft applause.

“Honoured teacher,” said the short man. “It was a
great privilege for us to watch such a masterly contest.
The machine was set to play at the very highest level.
I have never seen anyone struggle so mightily against
it.”

They applauded again, then slipped away, one by
one.

“But still,” said Akazawa. “You have defeated me.”

H e stumbled once as he made his way ont of
the shop. Outside, he turned left, for no par-
ticular reason, and almost immediately came
across a procession of solemn-faced children carrying
broken old robot toys. Two by two, the followed a
plumpish graceful lady in formal grey kimono. A little
girl, her face glistening with silent tears, held a one-
armed teddy bear, feebly moving its remaining limbs
and blinking large dark liquid eyes.

Moved, he followed the children to a small court-
yard, where a funeral pyre had already been built.
Each child in turn put a broken doll or bear on the
pile. On every toy fluttered a small ribbon, bearing a
prayer. The little bear was one of the last to be laid
down. It made small waving motions with its one arm.

The lady in the grey kimono pressed a button and
the funeral pyre ignited, flames engulfing the dead
toys. A narrow black column of smoke twisted up
into the cl6ar sky. High above, the smoke broke apart,
dissipating. He tried to compose a poem, but only the
first sentence of the Hagakure, like ashes, came to
mind: the Way of the Warrior is death.

Leaving the courtyard, he desired nothing more than
to return to the security of his home. It was the feeling
he used to get in the locker rooms before training,
knowing the sparring was going to be brutal. Some-
times, when he had arrived early, he would give in
to fear, change back into his street clothes, and leave,
flashed with shame. At home, he would play practice
games of go late into the night, unable to sleep.

Now, as be used his pocket guide to find a Western
style hotel and booked himself in, he felt that to return
home would be drop into a black pit from which he
would never dare to climb.

He checked his finances: his bank card showed his
account already overdrawn, and a credit chip, origi-
nally for a thousand New Yen, displayed a balance
of under six hundred. Oh, but he missed Yukiko, now
eight long years after her death. She had always been
so good at sorting out their accounts. He closed his
eyes and he could see her, nagging him for his lack
of care with money. So concerned. If only she could
be with him now.

He went back out into tbe night, and soon found
himself in the Asakusa, the Great White Way, a large
street packed with clubs and hotels and arcades, a
brightly lit treasure trove for tourists. Even at this late
hour, visitors thronged the pavements , their complex-
ions garish under the holes. Many of the younger
Japanese, male and female, wore light metallic-look-
ing kimonos with moving dragon designs. In the
shadowy sidestreets off the main thoroughfare lurked
a disquieting nnmber of streetpeople.

A floating sign read “Budo World.” He stepped
through a hole of a red torii gateway, into the VR
arcade. Though colourful displays were designed to
attract the eye to a series of martial images, the booths
were basically tiny rooms, occupied by players in
bodysuits and helmets. He watched a player fighting
in the dynamic Korean art of Taekwondo. Despite the
suit, he threw a fast series of jumping kicks and short
hody punches, while a flat screen showed the public
his virtual opponent, a smooth white figure with a
featureless face for a mask.

inIfrKone July 1992 23

“May I help you, sir?” a young assistant asked, rais-
ing his voice above the noise of the arcade.

“I thought the image would be more detailed, more
realistic.”

“Then the image would move more slowly, or more
jerkily, sir. Sometimes more symbolic imagery can be
very effective.” The young man gestured to the screen
two booths along, where the player had sliced his
virtual opponent across the abdomen with a fast iaido
draw of an imaginary katana sword. Scarlet blood flo-
wered on the faceless warrior as it sank to the ground.

“Teach me go,” he muttered.

“1 beg your pardon, sir?”

“1 would like to fight,” he said. “Preferably karate,
but aikido will do, whichever becomes available
first.”

“As you wish, sir. Please come with me to the
changing room at the rear.”

Warmed up and suited up, he was led, temporarily
blind, back to the fighting area. Steady hands brought
him to a halt, then disengaged themselves. There was
a click. It was as though a light had been turned on:
he was in a featureless room, with a deep grey floor
and pale bine walls and — he looked up - a dark grey
ceiling. The surfaces were too flat, too perfect. The
large room was bright, but there was no one point of
illumination. He cast no shadow. There was no sound
save for a faint background hum. Then the shadow
warrior appeared.

It bowed, then Akazawa followed suit. Sweat and
fear prickled the entire surface of his body. It started
to move and he goaded himself - now! He charged
forward with a powerful front kick but the image
shifted, a white arm flashed. . .and he found himself
lying flat on his back, staring at the blank ceiling.

Unhurt but trembling, he got to his feet and bowed.
He began sidestepping, circling. It was as though the
world was slightly out of kilter, the changes in
perspective not quite in synch with his movements.
When it charged, he thrust his leg sideways into its
ribcage. There was a flash of white fist before his face.
Then he and his opponent were suddenly standing
back in their original starting positions. Second point
to the machine.

He could not understand it; he felt sure his kick
had gone in on target. Steady. Breath control. He tried
to harmonize with his opponent’s breathing pattern,
to attack on the intake of breath — but there were no
breathing motions of its torso. In desperation, he
attacked with furious thrusting punches, but he felt
pressure on his wrist, a twist, and then the wall and
the ceiling rushed past his vision, and he landed on
his side with a thump. Winded and feeling very old,
he stood up slowly. He was alone in the room. Glow-
ing katakana hanging in the air indicated the score -
three to nothing - and invited him to try again. He
pressed the response symbol for “no.” The room went
dark.

Hands guided him back to the changing room and
peeled the suit off him. Showers were thoughtfully
provided. Afterwards, he paid for the game with the
credit chip, and watched its balance dwindle. He
thanked the staff courteously, and left quietly.

O utside on the street, tears began to fill his eyes.
He blinked them back as best he could, and
looked around for a phone booth. Finding
one, he spoke his son’s number as clearly as possible.
Thankfully, Tenka was out, so he could leave a mes-
sage.

“Tenka, my son. I’m — I am afraid I cannot face your
machine. I hope this won’t affect your work too much.
I’m. afraid I am retired now, completely. Take care,
my son.”

A thought formed as he walked away, one he could
not face as yet: from deepest despair, death is an hon-
ourable exit. A last effort of will bringing structure to
his life.

He took a sidestreet, away from the bright lights,
feeling a curious warm detachment which he had
known only a few times before, under extreme pres-
sure, when the ego unhooks itself from the body. The
faint voices of passers-by, the muted hiss of traffic,
were like sounds carried from a vast distance.

“Old mfen, 1 need your money.” In front of him stood
a tall wild-eyed man with clenched fists, swaying
slightly. “I mean it. You have to hand it over to me.
Right. Now. Or I must snap your neck. . Like a match-
stick.” He raised a large bloodied fist.

Akazawa turned to walk away, but the big man
moved with him. Some bystanders started forward to
belp, but it was too late. A powerful grip closed on
his throat.

To the onlookers, it seemed that the large young
man stumbled forwards, was slapped lightly in the
face by Akazawa, and tumbled over completely. He
came to rest in a foetal position, and began to emit
stentorian snoring noises as though he were heavily
asleep.

Akazawa felt panic. On sensing the choke fastening
on his throat, he. had slammed a knee strike into the
younger man’s outer thigh and whipped an open hand
strike directly onto his carotid sinus. No control.
Gods! What would happen if the young man died?

He sat the unconscious man up, kneeling behind
him and pushing a knee into his spine, both hands
holding the neck, massaging the vital points and then
pnshing up under the jaw to give traction on the upper
vertebrae. The awful nasal sounds stopped, but the
man’s hody remained limp, his head lolling when
Akazawa relaxed his grip. Don’t panic. Gather your
energy. He went through the shiatsu routine again,
trying to feel the young man’s spirit, to let his actions
flow with the body’s needs. Slowly, the young man
opened his eyes. Akazawa continued the treatment
until he was sure, then he lifted the younger man to
his feet, where he stayed, swaying.

There was a click, and a steel loop locked around
the mugger’s ankle, linked by a shining cable to a
squat white police robot. Where had that come from?
Already, one of the passers-by was talking excitedly
to the robot, his female companion corroborating the
story with enthusiastic nods and frequent interjec-
tions of “Hai!”

While the onlookers gave their statements excitedly,
one by one, the young captive stood with his head
bowed, and tears began to flow down his face. “I’m
so sorry,” he whispered, so softly that only Akazawa
could hear. “My poor wife. My beautiful baby. How
will they eat?” He sniffed. “How will they eat?”

24 intorxcHic* July 1992

The robot took Akazawa’s home address and the
name of the hotel; when his assailant had been for-
mally identified and the court case scheduled, he
would be informed. As the robot led away the unre-
sisting young man, several of the witnesses crowded
round Akazawa and invited him to join them for a
meal. He declined courteously.

For an hour he walked through the night, seeing
only the young man’s anguished face. A light rain
began to fall, blurring his vision like tears. Holos
splashed coloured ribbons on the rain-soaked streets.

H e awoke six hours later, with warm amber
sunlight streaming through the window of his
hotel room. Using the room terminal to order
breakfast, he noticed there was a message waiting: his
instructions to dial into Central Court in three weeks,
the exact time and his assailant’s personal details and
the list of charges appended to the main message.

His daily workout would have to wait. He per-
suaded room service to bring him new shirt, socks
and underclothes from the hotel shop, along with the
breakfast tray.

Finances were becoming a worry. He closed his
eyes and visualized a smooth lacquered box on a table,
and a paper chit representing the hotel bill beside it.
He saw an image of his own hand place the bill inside
the box and shut it away, to be removed and dealt
with later. It was the first of his mental preparations.

He travelled to his son’s office by subway. Though
the crowds were more packed and chaotic than on
the streets above, this time he felt no pressure, as
though he were travelling alone through Tokyo’s
underground system. He focused his mind on the
coming match, reviewing the strategies he might use
to open, seeing broad patterns of play, and his own
end game pushing through to victory.

The reception area was a white marble cube. A
young woman sat behind a bare smoked-glass table.
She rose and bowed.

“I would like to see Akazawa Tenka, please. I am
his father.”

“Of course, sir.” A calendar display appeared in
the glass of the table. “I’m afraid your son won’t be
in this morning. He left a message during the night.
Urgent family business in Hokkaido.” She looked
concerned.

So he was worried about me, after my call. And
now I have a good reason for backing out . . .

“I need to speak to Tenka’s manager. It’s very
important.” He said it quickly, before he could change
his mind.

“Your son reports directly to the chairman,
Sunadomari-san,” the girl said shyly. “Your son is a
most important person, Akazawa-san.”

“I would like to see the chairman then, please.”
“But sir, I am not allowed to call the chairman at
this time.”

“All the same, please call him.”

“But sir — ”

A disembodied voice spoke from the air beside him.
“I have passed Akazawa-sensei’s request to Suna-
domari-san. He is coming down to meet you now, sir . ”
“You’re my son’s computer system. The master of
strategy,” he said.

“Oh no, sir,” said the voice. “I am only a student

of the ways. Not yet a master, not at all, sir.”

Unsettled by its modesty, he said nothing. He
waited until an obese hard-looking man with cropped
hair came into the lobby, followed by a retinue of
rather weedy-looking young men.

They bowed to each other as equals. Akazawa spoke
first.

“I am very pleased to meet you. Please forgive my
discourtesy, but I have come to see my son’s machine.
It desires a lesson, and I would like to oblige it now. ”

“Ah, Akazawa-san. Sorry, but I’m not sure the sys-
tem is ready for such a strong challenge yet. I believe
a meeting in nine days’ time was requested. In any
case, we would of course be most pleased if your son
could be present.”

He stared hard at Sunadomari. “I wish to fight it
now.”

The machine said, “I would be honoured to play
against Akazawa-sensei now.”

Sunadomari nodded his assent and started to turn
away. •

“There’s one more thing,” said Akazawa, ignoring
the unhappy looks of Sunadomari’s assistants. “I wish
to be paid for the challenge. Ten thousand New Yen.
Credit chip or cash. Do we have a deal?”

Sunadomari stared back at him. Finally he said, “I
would be happy to pay ten thousand New Yen to the
winner of this match. That seems to be appropriate,
don’t you think?”

Akazawa bowed in assent. Sunadomari led away
his disbelieving staff, while the receptionist led him
to the elevator for his son’s office.

I nside, he stated curiously around, for he had
never been here before. Plain screen walls and
tatami-covered floor. Holo ideograms hanging in
the air, such as Sun Tsu’s principle of careful plan-
ning: The victorious strategist seeks battle after vic-
tory has been won. At least he had not chosen the
usual quotation, about subduing the enemy without
fighting being the highest skill. Akazawa had always
found that a strangely pious sentiment from a cold-
blooded psychotic with no regard for human life.

A traditional go table squatted in the centre of the
room. Two earthenware bowls contained the stones.
On one side of the table was a cushion, on the other,
a small robot arm angled over tbe board.

“Greetings, Akazawa-sensei,” said the system.
“This is a great honour. Would you care to play black
or white?”

“White,” growled Akazawa. “You move first.” He
knelt down and sat back on his heels.

The robot arm immediately dipped into the bowl
of black stones, picked one out and placed it on the
board. Akazawa quickly responded by placing a white
stone nearby, threatening. Battle was joined. They
began to play fiercely, armies fighting it out man to
man. Neither tried to play safe. Every stone was
pitched straight into battle. Time passed without
notice.

“Father — ” Tenka’s voice. He shut it out, unable to
afford the distraction.

Stones swirled across the board in shifting patterns
of play. Spirals and whorls of black and white , captur-
ing, being captured. Chaotic, since Tenka had spoken.
A strong white pattern began to emerge, linking

inlcrzoiK" July 1992 25

around multiple eyes, spreading like tentacles across
the board, a solid organic whole. The game had tipped
from chaos to stability. Akazawa’s victory was
assured.

“Thank you for the game, grandfather,” said the
machine softly. “I concede defeat.”

Blinking slowly, he drew his attention back from
the board and looked up at the ceiling. “You played
strongly. 1 had to resort to Sun Tsu’s admonition: on
desperate ground, fight.” He smiled.

“When I attacked,” said the machine. “You beat
down the leading edge of my attack. It was the Red
Leaves Cut of Musashi.”

“So you have studied the Book of Five Rings, also,”
he said. “And my strategy at the end?”

“It was the Fire and Stones Cut, grandfather. You
broke through my attack with a powerful all-out
strike.”

He nodded. He turned to look at his son. Tenkawas
kneeling in the doorway, pale and worried. He
immediately put the palms of his hands on the floor
and made a full formal bow, forehead between hands,
before straightening up.

“It — he — calls me grandfather,” said Akazawa. “I
think you have created more than you said, neh?”

“Father!” said Tenka. “Fve been so worried. I
thought - Father, I’ve paid the landlord, you were a
month overdue, and all those other bills! Why didn’t
you come to me sooner? I didn’t know you had money
worries.”

“I don’t,” said Akazawa. “Besides, your boss owes
me ten thousand.”

“But you don’t need

“You will be paid, grandfather,” said the machine.

Akazawa smiled. It was a huge broad grin, pushing
up the skin on his -high cheekbones and deepening
his laughter lines, and his dark eyes were sparkling
with warmth and love and glee.

“Tenka, my honoured son,” he said. “I am very,
very proud of you.”

S hortly after dawn, a painfully thin woman
kneels in her bare one-room flat, staring at her
child who is finally asleep, exhausted by a
night of crying from hunger.

“Your father did a terrible thing,” she whispers.
“He didn’t meant to. But he’s killed us.”

She stands up, clutching a slender-bladed much-
resharpened carving knife. Oblivious, the baby sleeps
on. If only she had the courage, it would be the quick
way out for both of them. But . . . with a cry, she throws
the knife to the floor. Unnoticed, a small slip of print-
out slips from her sleeve and flutters to the floor. It
is the court’s notification of the time of her husband’s
trial.

She picks up the child, holding it to her. A sudden
vision of the two of them, flying free like spirits,
unfolds in her mind’s eye. Slowly, no longer seeing
her flat, she shuffles to the front door, opens it, and
steps out onto the balcony. Her hairs swirls wildly in
the wind. They are thirty stories above the ground.

In a moment she can be over the low balcony wall
and launched into space. Freedom...

Her foot catches on something. A box. It has been
left in her doorway: a small box, wrapped in expen-
sive grey paper which is expertly folded so that no

26 interzone July 1992

ribbon is required to hold the package together.

Kneeling down, still clutching the child to her, she
unwraps the box with one hand, and opens it. Inside
are a credit chip, a small note, and a white blossom.

The credit chip shows its balance in glowing digits:
ten thousand New Yen.

The note bears jlhe following:

Red and green neon casts
The shadows of bamboo-leaves
Sweeping the ground.

The blossom is a ball of pure white: a white chrysan-
themum, a soft globe of beautiful white florets in sim-
ple harmony. From just one petal, a tiny segment has
been torn. It is the balancing flaw, which defines the
purity of transient beauty.

John Meaney is a completely new British writer. Aged 34,
he works as a consultant for a well-known software house.
He is ranked black belt by the fapan Karate Association,
and is a keen weightlifter. He lives in Tunbridge Wells and
says: “My wife, Yvonne, and I are owned by a large white
tom cat called Pip.”

A LETHAL SATIRE

Soltan Gris invents new
and exciting ways to
murder Heller who sails
untouched through bad
press and murder
attempts.

Gris meanwhile has his
own life sabotaged by his
two new wives, Adora
and Candy. More lethal
then ever. Mission Earth
burns its way to the final
conclusion.

“...Oversize characters,
extravagant plotting and
some very funny
situations...” The Times

Voyage of Vengeance, Volume 7 of L. Ron Hubbard’s
Mission Earth series is now on sale in paperback
(£4.50) or on audio cassette (£6.99) at all good
bookshops. Get your copy now!

NEW ERA Publications UK

78 Hoimethorpe Avenue, Redhill, Surrey RHl 2NL
Tel: 0737 766760 Fax: 0737 765942
(>') 1992 New Hra Publications UK Ltd.

The Sleel

Mary A. T

laudia dreamt there was something living in
the sink.

It was like a moray eel, black and vicious.
Something that grabbed her fingers and would not let
go when she put her hand in to let out the dirty dish-
water.

It was just a nightmare. When she woke up, she felt
nauseated. It was probably the food at the Quonset.

Randy liked to clean up after his Tuesday night
poker parties by dumping everything from the table
indiscriminately into the sink. This morning there
were seven dirty glasses, a mug with peanut butter
smeared on it, four cigarette butts, part of a pizza crust,
a sauce dish half full of vanilla pudding, and a used
tissue. Randy hated a a mess. So he cleaned up a mess
by throwing all this stuff in the sink, squirting deter-
gent over it, and running the sink full of hot water.

By morning, the water was cold, a repulsive cocktail
of congealed grease and snack rejects. Claudia knew
she would have to stick her arm up to the elbow into
that liquid nightmare and pull the plug so the dirty
water could drain out and she could remove the gar-
bage, then run fresh hot water.

Since it was a task she dreaded, Claudia put it off.
She went in the bathroom and did her eyes. She had
pretty pale green eyes, and she wore green frosted eye
shadow and dark brown mascara to make them
greener. She put blusher on her cheekbones to make
her face a little less cherubic. Then she fluffed her
hair (still towhead blonde) and tied it with a green
gauze scarf. She was cute. She knew she was cute.
Even Randy never took her seriously. If she ever had
children, she would be the mother that the principal
kept telling to get back in line with the eighth-grade
girls.

When she came out of the bathroom, she saw rip-
ples in the sink, as if something in the water had
laroken the surface and submerged again.

She had felt a little queasy before, but this gave her
a bad jolt. Right away, she dialled Randy’s lab. He
would be there cleaning out his stuff. Tomorrow was
graduation, and his fellowship duties were over. He
had not found a job yet, but when he did, they would
get married and she would go back and start on her
Ph.D.

“Dr Vinddhata’s office.” It sounded like the Hunga-
rian grad student who worked with Randy.

“Hi, Gyorgy. Is Randy there?”

“No, I don’t think so. Dr Vinddhata said he wasn’t
coming in.”

“Oh. Well, Dr Vinddhata is mistaken. Listen, when
he comes in, tell him I have, uh, a plumbing problem.
No big thing, but it’s kind of, you know, stomach-
turning.”

She m^e scrambled eggs and toast, but stopped
eating after one bite. She twisted around so her back
was to the sink, but she kept thinking about the roiling
waters and what might be under the surface. Finally,
she carried her plate and glass into the bedroom,
where she ate sitting on the bed.

W ednesday of graduation week was never
very busy for her boss, the Assistant Chair-
man of the math department. Dr Spencer
sent her over to the library to photocopy an article on
the Enormous Theorem from Scientific American, but
he told her she could goof off the rest of the day. She
read a French book about fresh-water mermaids. The
author claimed to have caught two of them in the
Marne. Claudia didn’t like the book. The author
seemed to have missed the point about mermaids, to
her mind. He dissected them.

“What are you reading. Miss Seintheure?” Dr
Spencer asked stroking his sparse black beard. She
held up the book so he could read the title. He stifled
a giggle and strode back into his office.

After work, of course, the mess in the sink was still
there. By this time, Claudia was ticked off. Randy
always promised he would let the water out of the
sink, if she was so silly as to be repelled by mere
cold-water garbage soup. But he was never there to
do it. Claudia made a mental check mark on her
scorecard of grievances (he’d been unusually insensi-
tive in bed last night, too], and pushed up her sweater
sleeves.

She had to convince herself that nothing was mov-
ing in the water. The kitchen was a dim room, facing
on a dark alley. She turned the lights all on and peered
into the murk. Nothing was visible but disintegrating
scraps of food undulating like sea weed, and shreds
of tobacco. She got a long-handled pair of tongs aird
pulled the sink stopper out so the water could go
down the drain.

The water glugged down, blubbering like some-
thing in a documentary about sea-sickness. Finally
she saw that the drain was stopped up.

The idea of using the toilet plunger on the kitchen
sink revolted her. And anyway, there did seem to be
something black and rubbery, the diameter of a zuc-
chini, protruding from the drain. Her skin crawled.

iiilc^rxoiio July 1992 27

She poked at it, but it was gone. The kitchen light
was bad, and it was getting dark out, so surely she
was mistaken.

She decided to grab a pittaburger at the Quonset.

When she got back to the apartment, Randy still
wasn’t back. She tried calling Elio, the landlord, hop-
ing he would come over and clear the drain, but there
was no answer. No, she decided, all crafty cruelty.
Randy was just as squeamish as she: make him fix it
when he gets home. He must be drinking with his
buddies from the lab. They followed him around like
some hero, partly because he was getting his Ph.D.
before any of them, but mostly because he had a repu-
tation as a ladies’ man.

Randy had pale blue eyes and curly blonde hair,
only slightly thin on the crown. He had a secretive,
white smile, but that was not what attracted women.
He had a way of saying sarcastic things in ways that
simply melted undergraduate girls. Claudia was the
envy of the third floor of Newgate Hall, which is
where the handful of women physics majors tended
to live.

Ha. Little did they know.

Claudia got herself a can of wild cherry soda. She
reached into the cupboard for a glass, thought better
of it, and drank it out of the can. Randy would never
do that. He always said there might be a worm in the
can, and you wouldn’t see it until it slid right out into
your mouth.

The sink was still half-full of greasy water. Maybe
a little had drained out, but not much.

It was getting to be a contest of wills : Claudia versus
the thing in the sink. Claudia went into the bedroom,
stripped to the skin, and slid into the unmade bed.
After a moment of reflection, she got up, switched the
light back on, and regarded her naked self in the dres-
ser mirror. No, she was damned if she was goiflg to
invite his attentions tonight. Though it was far too
warm, she pulled a smock printed with green roses
out of the bottom drawer and shrugged it over her
head. The chinzy fabric felt eroticagainst herthigbs.

Dozing, she obsessed again on the image of the
water lazily sloshing. More than once she raised her
head, thinking she could hear it. This is ridiculous,
she thought. By morning she would have some exotic
culture growing in there. She thought of Randy and
pulled her knees up to her chest.

I n her dream, the thing in the drain talked to her.
It had an urbane southern accent, like Rhett
Butler, and it recited poetry. “J’avais capture de
mon seant ce furtif papillon.” French verse, about a
butterfly. Then it bit her left breast off.

She sat bolt upright, unable to shake the nightmare.
She had apparently rolled over onto a coathanger
Randy had left in the bed. It was almost time to get
up anyway.

The coathanger still had a plaid necktie on it. She
slid out of bed and opened Randy’s closet to throw
the coathanger back in.

Randy’s clothes were gone.

It all made sense. That S.O.B.

She ran into his study. Yes, his computer, most of
his books, and his CD player were gone. The bastard
insisted on keeping the CD player (she had made the
last four payments) in his study because he liked to

28 inlorzono July 1992

listen to music while he studied for his dissertation
defence.

She sat down at his desk and cried. When she raised
her head, she focused on a paperweight she had
bought for him at Loch Ness. She hurled it at the book-
case on the far wall. It broke, satisfyingly. She pitched
his stained coffee mug and an empty diskette box after
it.

The most vicious, horrid, disgusting thing he had
done to her was leave the sink full of garbage. She
decided she was going to get him for that.

Desertion by one’s live-in lover was not a recog-
nized excuse for missing work in the math depart-
ment. Spencer did not care if she sat and read
Nathalie-Charles Henneberg, on whom she hoped to
write her Ph.D. dissertation, but he wanted her there
to answer the phone. Claudia considered calling in
sick, but decidednot to be a wimp, damn it. She threw
on a beige sweater and slacks and went to work.

Spencer clucked when she told him crossly that
Randy had left. He knew Randy distantly. In fact,
Randy had gotten her the job, and Spencer would use
his connections in the Romance Language depart-
ment to get her into the doctoral program next year.
He patted her on the shoulder and told her not to fret,
there were plenty of physics grad students who would
adore a cute little thing like her.

She winced. She thought Spencer had known she
was sensitive about her “cuteness.”

“And there’s something living in my sink,” she said.

Spencer lumbered around and scowled. “What
kind of something?”

“A merman, I tbink.”

Spencer chuckled. “Feed it virgin olive oil and give
it a virgin wool blanket.”

“Mermen are like unicorns?”

“Oh, yes, they love virgins. Climb right up in their
laps.”

Claudia shuddered. “Thank God. I’m safe.”

Later in the afternoon, when almost everybody in
the department had gone home, Spencer shouted
from his office. “Miss Seintheure? Could ypu come
and get this letter?” He did not like her first name. He
called her Miss Seintheure with a certain droll
piquancy. Odd, thought Claudia; he’s usually jump-
ing up at any excuse. But she went into the office. He
was leaning back in his chair, fingers interlaced over
his paunch. He motioned at the rough draft of a letter
on the desk, smiling mysteriously. She glanced down.
His fly was fully open, his half-erect organ lolling out
of it like the tongue of an exhausted dog.

Goddamn her reflexes, she blushed. And fled.
Spencer, you idiot.

S ally wasn’t home. Sally always knew what to
do in cases of harrassment, loss of love, and
stopped-up plumbing. Claudia kept ringing her
number until almost midnight. It seemed silly to com-
plain about Spencer’s strange behaviour. Maybe he
was only trying to be funny. He always did have a
peculiar sense of humour. She certainly was not going
to turn him in for sexual harrassment. But what
should she do?

Sit down and have a good cry?

That seemed too easy.

The sink seemed the problem easiest to solve at

midnight on a work night, so, armed with her courage,
she picked up the toilet plunger and made ready for
battle.

The sink had drained out.

She ran a little water into it, experimentally. The
drain emptied freely, as if there had never been a stop-
page.

“I’ll be damned,” she said under her breath. She
turned on the overhead light, which gave her a little
better visibility, and peered into the drain.

Yes, she could just barely see it. Something like a
black rubber ball, shiny wet, deep in the drain pipe.
She felt her gorge rise. It looked surprisingly like the
thing in her dream.

Was it just her imagination, or it was pulsating?

Once the landlord had given her and Randy a huge
basket of home garden produce. The lettuce had been
green and lush, but she had found a colony of slugs
in it. To get rid of them, she had filled the sink with
water and ice cubes, dunked the lettuce so the slugs
were stunned by the cold, and then rinsed the lettuce
off, letting the slugs go down the drain.

Slugs and eels. Was it a slug? An eel? She snickered.
Perhaps she’d keep it as a horrid pet, and call it a sleek

Was she a coward to be so squeamish?

She scraped the worst of the garbage out of the sink
and dried her hands. She thrust a pair of wooden
chopsticks, left over from some midnight feast at the
Lychee Nut Garden, into the drain, attempting to snag
the black horror. It slipped away. Finally she decided
she was imagining the thing.

But something had offered spongy resistance to the
tips of the chopsticks. She shook the uneasy feeling
off and went in the living room to try Sally’s number
one last time.

Sally finally answered. Claudia launched into the
story about Spencer.

“Well, Claud,” and Claudia envisioned her pursing
her lips on a Virginia Slim, “I wouldn’t make a fuss
about it. You said it wasn’t very big, right?”

“Sally, that is not the point!”

Sally sighed. “Look, don’t let it throw you. Either
just ignore it or — why not show the old boy a good
time?”

“That’s your answer to everything.”

“Surely you have no loyalty to Randy now?”

Claudia hesitated. “Spencer is married.”

“Them’s the best kind, girl. The married ones are
always soooo grateful.”

Claudia ended the conversation with a little snig-
ger. Sally gave rotten advice, but she always made
her smile.

She glanced once more the sink drain. It had been
her imagination, she decided. No moray eel. No giant
lettuce slug. No sleek Just an over-active imagination,
tinged with stress.

hat night she slept in just her panties.

She dreamt of the thing in the drain again.
It had gotten into her desk at work. When she
opened the bottom drawer, it snaked out and wrapped
itself around her wrists. In terror, she tried to pull free,
but it slithered up her arm and nursed at her breast.
Its mouth was filled with corrosive venom and fangs.
She screamed for Spencer, but when he appeared, he
was naked except for his necktie and an obscene smile.

intvrzoiif July 1992 29

iiiusiraiiuns uy raui iviuniiuru

She shook herself out of the dream. But the malig-
nant atmosphere of the dream would not dissipate.
The eel-slug from the drain was gone, Spencer with
his diabolic smile was gone, but the terror was still
there.

She dialled the crisis counselling line.

No, she told herself crossly, and slammed the phone
down just as a baritone voice answered. I’ve got to
grow up.

She switched on all the lights in the bedroom and
all the kitchen lights.

Then she could sleep.

T he next day was hectic. Summer registration
had begun, and Spencer had to give a paper in
Houston on Saturday. The whole math depart-
ment was in the office at once, giving her letters to
type, book orders to confirm. She hardly thought of
Randy, and the thing in the drain was quite out of her
mind. Towards four-thirty, she called Sally at work
and made a date to go out drinking.

It was Friday. A bit tipsy, she let herself into the
apartment and flicked the light switch. The overhead
light was burned out. She felt her way across the
kitchen floor to the bathroom. The bathroom over-
head light did not come on either. Damnit damnit
damnit, she said to herself. Where were the damn
fuses?

She felt her way back toward the sink, to find fuses
in the cupboard above. The room smelled damp, like
an unaired beach cottage.

On the way, something brushed damply against her
ankle.

Suddenly sober, heart thumping, she froze. A
whimper formed in her throat. She repressed it.
Flashlight?

If she called out, would the upstairs neighbours
hear her? And what would they say, to be rousted out
of bed in the middle of the night (for they had small
children) because she imagined she had tripped over
a moray eel in her kitchen?

She went back to the bathroom and dug in her purse
until she found a match. Somewhere there must be a
flashlight that still worked. Or, where had she put the
Christmas candles?

The lights suddenly came on. A power failure, then.
Cautiously, she peeked into the kitchen. There was
nothing On the floor.

She threw her purse on the bed and squared her
shoulders. Drunk or not, she was going to make sure
whatever was in that sink (oh, it was nothing, nothing,
surely) was not alive.

She found the drain cleaner under the sink, poured
a double dose into the dark hole of the drain, and
flushed it with water.

It gurgled, darkly.

There was a sudden commotion, bubbling, banging
of pipes, churning. Then, quiet.

Deeply pleased, she went to bed. But she did wear
the smock Randy hated so much. It seemed protective.

F orty-five minutes later, she awoke. There was
slithering. No other word for it, slithering.
Get up, she told herself. Get up and close the
bedroom door. Lock it.

But the bedroom door was being slowly pushed open.

Turn on the light, she thought. This is a Guide
Michelin four-star rated nightmare. Seven course. Tip
and tax included.

Instinct tells us to play possum when there’s some-
thing in a dark house that does not belong there. With
effort, she got her arm to move, her hand to press the
plastic switch on the lamp.

There was nothing there. Of course, the door was
a little ajar. She hadn’t latched it properly.

Oh look. There, on the floor.

A dark rivulet of shadow. A cord of long black mus-
cle. A tentacle. A thick snake out of the doorway of
psychosis. Motionless for a moment, waiting, but
ready to move.

Like a mute cat wanting to be petted, the horror
raised its head.

Its mouth appalled her. It seemed pursed, like a
tiny human mouth. Then she saw it was more like a
sphincter. The puckered mouth relaxed and she saw
teeth.

They wt)uld have been less frightening had they
been shark’s teeth, or needles. But they were very
human teeth, flat in the front like a rodent’s incisors.
The canines were no longer than those in a human
mouth.

At first, she did not see the eyes. Then it blinked,
and she saw the pinks of them, tiny, rheumy, set way
back in the torpedo head.

As if in glad recognition, it gathered itself, skin rip-
pling, and climbed up the leg of the bed.

Claudia’s paralysis left her, but too late. She tried
to throw herself out of the bed on the other side, but
when she extended her leg, the thing whipped for-
ward and caught her ankle in a boa-constrictor grip.

Neatly, with skill that bespoke previous captures,
it slid its coils around the ankle until its grip was a
good yard below its head. Then it slithered up her
body, lightly contacting the cheap cotton of her
smock, still squeezing her ankle in its constrictor
coils, and suspended its head inches from her face,
breathing a stench like decayed fish.

She winced away. Scream, damn you, scream, she
told herself. And she did cry out, once. But she could
not remember the names of the people upstairs, and
perhaps her wordless scream sounded like something
that had happened almost every night when Randy
was still sleeping with her.

It struck at her face, her shoulders, her neck. She
fought with her hands, but the thing was strong, fast.
She felt slashes, burning, filled with some poison, on
her face, her shoulders, her neck.

And, yes, it was poison. And the poison began to
work.

She felt everything. She saw everything. But her
body had become heavy, too heavy to move. Even fear
leaked away from her, as if she had been anaes-
thetized. She struggled to keep her eyes open, afraid
that the poison would paralyze her diaphragm, and
she would stop breathing. But that’s silly, she
thought. My heart would stop too.

She could not move. But she could watch.

Flaring and closing rhythmically, behind the tiny
pink eyes, were gills which dispensed a thick lubricat-
ing mucus. The face was naked, covered with leath-
ery, wet skin, but a few inches down the body began
a close, raspy coat of hair, like that on a black horse.

30 interzone July 1992

First it sang to her. She was not sure how she knew
it was supposed to be music. It was ugly, gurgling
sounds, bubbling out of the horrid sphincter of its
mouth. She felt it was a dialect of a language she knew,
adapted for the mouth of a sleel, greasy fricatives and
wet plosives, spattering her face with burning spit.

Then it did its little dance, all' up and down her
body, touching, probing, pressing. Its final step was
a slithering progress from her imprisoned ankle
(though it hardly need grasp her now, fixed as she
was) up her shuddering, helpless leg.

Paralyzed as she was, she wondered, before she lost
consciousness, how she could feel such agony.

W hen she woke up next morning, bloodied
and stiff, her head pounded. She hobbled
into the bathroom, and tried not to look in
the mirror. She put the smock back on to hide her
bruises, and spent the day in bed.

There was no question of her calling Elio, of course.
She thought fleetingly of packing up and leaving. It
was madness that she did not. But of course the sleel
wouldn’t have liked that. And her blood was still full
of sleel venom.

She had a sneaking suspicion she liked the stuff.
She spent most of Saturday and Sunday in bed, half
in delirium. In moments of lucidity, she tried to call
Sally, but somehow gave up. The sleel would not want
her talking to Sally. It wanted her to stay in bed. She
explained, aloud, that she would eventually have to
go to work. There was no particular answer. The sleel
either did not understand or did not care. Perhaps,
she thought, it might let her go to work.

When the sleel came to her Sunday night, she was
less frightened and fought less. The paralysis came
more quickly and perhaps the pain was a little less
intense. She knew by then that as long and the sleel
and she were such close friends, there would be pain.
But it didn’t matter. She could hardly move afterward,
even after the venom had worn off. But since she had
fought less, there were few new bruises or toothmarks.

If only the sleel would not sing to her before it came
into her.

Monday she dressed slowly, omitting her elaborate
eye painting, and ate a few slices of bread. The sleel
had disappeared, as it did now that she and it had
made up and become friends, except when it wanted
her for whatever it wanted her for. The drain was not
stopped up. The dishes from the previous Tuesday
were still dirty. She thought of soaking the scum off
them and washing them. Perhaps tonight, she
thought, if I have the energy.

She felt better once she got to work. Spencer, how-
ever, acted strangely. He came into the front office
and gave a little speech to her about how he hoped
she had not misunderstood his joke and it would be
better if she did not mention it to anybody.

“Of course, Dr Spencer,” she said mildly. It really
didn’t make any difference. Nothing made any differ-
ence.

“And I’m really sorry Randy left you,” Spencer said,
trying to prolong the conversation, trying to pry for-
giveness and acceptance out of her.

“Randy? What about Randy?”

Spencer looked at her oddly and fled.

iul('rzoiii‘ July 1992 31

A t night, the sleel was there. It had no set pattern.
Some nights she would think her ordeal was
b. over for the night, and then it would come
back and sting and penetrate her even more savagely .
It never struck during the day. She spent her days as
in a dream. Her clothes hung on her; she supposed
that she was losing weight. She felt as if she were on
drugs, some kind of drugs that caused disorientation,
fever. Or as if she had some tropical illness.

The sleel loved her. At least she had that.

Sally came by, said she was worried. Sally had gone
to the baccalaureate service and found Randy’s name
among the Ph.D. conferees. After it was printed “in
absentia.”

’’You know they must have turned in the copy for
the programme at least two months ago,” Sally
reasoned. “So he must have been planning this.”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Claudia. She
was wishing Sally would go home.

“The bastard could at least have left you the CD
player.”

“I would never listen to it.” The sleel sang to her.
That was the part she hated most. If only it would
stop singing.

“Claud, what’s wrong with you? You used to love
music. You look terrible.”

“Sally, I need to be alone. Maybe later.”

Sally exhaled heavily. “Sure, Claud. Sure. Call me
sometime, right?” And at the door, “What the hell is
wrong with you, girl?”

Claudia smiled slightly and lifted her shoulders.
Sally shook her head, and was gone.

The sleel did not like Sally. The sleel wanted
Claudia to stay home and be quiet and drink a little
tea and be nice. The sexual part of the relationship
between Claudia and the sleel was now over, but the
sleel wanted Claudia to sleep a lot and eat jelly
sandwiches and canned goods.

C laudia slept until two or three in the afternoon
on weekends. It was a time she could catch up
on her sleep. She had a low-grade fever. Some
remnant of rationality told her she ought to go to the
doctor and find out why. But then the doctor was sure
to ask questions. She figured the sleel would not want
her to do that.

It was fun just staying in bed and occasionally wak-
ing up to go to the bathroom or have a glass of water.
Soon, Claudia hoped, she would be able to sleep all
the time she was not at work or eating.

Summer passed.

Saturday, about noon, she was in bed. Her head
hurt, but she was able to make the pain go away by
dozing. Her mouth felt dry and her vision was unfo-
cused. The door opened a crack. She had the chain
on. Nobody should disturb her and her sleel.

Some curiosity remained in her, so she slid heavily
out of bed and undid the chain.

It was Randy.

He closed the door behind himself and sat on a
kitchen chair. Claudia, without enthusiasm, slumped
on the chair opposite.

“I’m back.”

She shrugged. Obviously, he was back.

“You haven’t picked up the mail for days, appa-

rently. The box was jammed. Look, here’s a letter from
the math department. Here.”

She looked at it without interest.

“For God’s sake, Claudia, open it.”

“You open it. I’m tired.”

Randy ripped the letter open. “It’s from Spencer.
Your boss. Claudia, he’s fired you.”

Claudia felt vague regret, and a bit of gnilt. Maybe
she should have made a bigger fuss over Spencer’s
indiscretion. Or maybe she should have screwed him.

“Don’t you care? What in God’s name is wrong with
you? You look awful.”

“Randy, I don’t know. I was asleep. I want to go
back to sleep.” And as an afterthought, “You left a
sink full of dirty dishes.”

Randy’s eyes narrowed, trying to figure her out.
“I’m sorry. I really am sorry. I made a mistake, I
shouldn’t have left.”

“It doesn’t matter. I just remembered , that was what
I was maddest about. The dirty dishes.”

“I’m sor^y. I should have done the dishes before I
left you. Is that what you want me to say? Are you
crazy?”

“Uh, yes, maybe.”

The sleel would not want her toying with that
thought.

“Do you want me back? Can I at least stay here and
talk? For a week or two, before fall semester starts? I
got a teaching job, Claudia. Did I tell you?”

“No, you didn’t write. Or did you? I forget.”

Randy licked his lips. “Could we just talk about me
coming back? I’ve changed. Really, I have. It was
stupid.” Apparently pride was a bitter mouthful. “I
didn’t know how much I would miss you. Please
understand.”

She did not understand. And the sleel certainly
would not want Randy here.

“No, actually, Randy, you can’t stay here. Things
have changed. My situation has changed. I guess I
may need to get a new job.”

“Didn’t you get accepted into the doctoral prog-
ram?

She half-smiled. She had been accepted, but it was
too late to register now. Way too late. And she
wouldn’t be needing a Ph.D., what with the sleel here
now and everything.

“Randy, I really need to get some more sleep. You
have to go. I’m sorry. It just wouldn’t work out.” She
heaved herself to her feet and stood supporting her
weight against the counter. Randy was beginning to
bore her.

“Claudia, let me look at you. What’s happened?
Why didn’t you tell me this? You should have told
me right away.”

“Told you? Told you what?”

“I didn’t notice. How could I have not noticed?”

“Noticed what?”

He smiled, nervously, tenderly. “Is it mine, Claud?
When is it due?”

Part of her came awake. Maybe it was good that
Randy had come back.

“Yours?” She felt hungry stirrings inside her.
“Come see it when it’s born, Randy. I’m sure it’ll learn
to love you.”

32 intorzone July 1992

Mary A. Turzillo is a relatively new American writer who
has sold stories and poems to F&'SF, Asimov’s, Weird Tales
and PuJphouse. The above piece marks her first appearance
in Interzone. She lives in Ohio.

Lawrence Watt-Evans (see story, pages 16-17) last appeared
in Interzone with “Targets” (number 47, our Aboriginal SF
swap issue). Over the past 12 years he has been a prolific
novelist in both sf and fantasy modes, his books including
The Lure of the Basilisk (1980), The Misenchanted Sword
(1985), With a Single Spell (1987), The Unwilling Warlord
(1987) and Blood of a Dragon (Del Rey, 1991). He lives in
Maryland, USA.

Subscribe to
Interzone now —
and be sure not to
miss an issue.
Form on page 52.

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iiilcrzoiip July 1992 33

Tube Com

Television Reviews by Wendy Bradley

H ave I ever told you my theory
about Mark Hamill? Aw, go on, it
won’t take a minute, let me tell you my
theory about Mark Hamill.

OK, well, you remember how in Star
Wars he was so blond and wore white
all the time and was really quite cute
in a whiney sort of way? Yes you do.
Think back. Waaaaay back. Well then:
move on till you come to The Empire
Strikes Back: you can’t write him out
of the script because you didn’t leave
any plot-holes he could fall through,
you don’t think the audience will go
for a re-cast either but the problem is,
he isn’t cute any more. He’s lost that
adolescent blond prettiness and his
face has grown up sort of, well, ordi-
nary. And that is why Luke spends
ninety per cent of The Empire hanging
upside down, in the hope that we
won’t notice. Yes he does: first the
Hoth Wampa hangs him upside down
in its cave, then Yoda trains him by
making him levitate on one finger and
finally we get the big confrontation
with Vader and, yes, how does it end?
With him hanging upside down from
the bottom of a cloud city, I thangyew,
QED.

Why am I telling you all this? Oh
yes, I remember, there’s this series the
BBC have bought and he’s in it. Actu-
ally just about everybody is in it; it
leans heavily on star actors and star
directors. Steven Spielberg’s Amazing
Stories, it’s called, although the most
amazing thing about it seems to be the
time it’s taken to get over here from the
States. The publicity material that
comes with it refers to Spielberg as just
about to begin directing The Color Pur-
ple, which may give you the flavour.
It ran in the States for 46 episodes over
a two-year period ending 9/11/87 ~ yes,
1987 — and folded naturally in the end
as the ratings sank slowly in the west.
Spielberg (also described on the press
release as the director of Star Wars,
which will certainly surprise Lucas)
bought the rights to the American gol-
den-age pulp magazine Amazing
Stories with the intention of using
some of the stories as an ideas bank,
but the eleven episodes from the first
series, which is what we are seeing in
the UK, consist wholly of original
material. No, really, that’s what it says.
It’s all Spielberg’s fault and he owns
up to if.

34 inl«>rz«n(‘ July 1992

T he Mission, the one-hour special
which kicked off the series on Eas-
ter Sunday, was not only directed by
Spielberg, he also came up with the
idea for the story. Basically it’s the last
hour of a WWII movie cut down by
missing out all that Goodbye-Mr-Chips
scene setting and character establish-
ing. We first see the plane, Friepdly
Persuasion, in a lot of mythical mist
where a pair of cheerful cockneys
info dump us that Jonathan has flown
23 missions without a scratch and is
the crew’s good luck charm. He
shouldn’t be on the flight at all since
his replacement is present but Kevin
Costner (in the Robert Donat role as
Captain) lets him come. Jonathan’s an
ace cartoonist as well as an ace gunner
and fortunately his best friend (Kiefer
Sutherland in John Mills’ part] is on
hand for him to confide to that his wife
is four months pregnant and they’re
going to call it after him. He might as
well just wander round with a sign say-
ing “DOOMED.”

For doomed he of course is: dakka-
dakkadakka he hits the enemy and a
big piece of propellor goes nyaaaaaaah
right through the middle of the plane,
handily coming to rest right over the
belly hatch where he’s crouched alter-
nately firing and whipping up carica-
tures of his buddies. But no! The debris
has jammed him in, no really, he’s
really stuck in there. Yes, I know
there’s a hole for him to pass out his
cartoons and the rest of the crew to
reach in and touch his head for luck
but he’s stuck.

He just is.

Because he is, all right?

No, 1 don’t know why they can’t
crowbar out some of the plexi around
the hole and enlarge it for him to climb
through, they just can’t.

Look, Kevin Costner has just
severely'burnt his hand trying to shift
the debris, so don’t come whining to
me about verisimilitude. And the land-
ing gear is trashed too. So the plane is
going to have to toboggan in, and guess
who’s going to get severely squidged
in the process?

Quel dilemma! Jonathan is alive and
well but completely stuffed. They try
unpacking a parachute and passing it
through the handy hole but they snag
the material on the way and it rips and
there’s no time to try again; Costner

says “You know the math” — they can’t
try again and glide in because there’s
a wood by the landing field, they’re out
of fuel and a couple of the engines have
packed up. It’s him or them.

OK, so we get the touching stuff
ladled on thick. All the crew come and
touch his head for luck, like a sacra-
ment, and he calls all their names and
kisses Keifer Sutherland’s hand. His
wife comes to the airfield and stands
there looking nothing at all like Greer
Carson. A priest starts fo broadcast the
funeral service, helpfully, in an echoey
Valentine Dyall sort of voice. He makes
the “I had a good life before the war”
speech. He makes the “Cap’n’s gonna
thinka something before it’s too late”
speech. They make the “It ain’t gonna
be quick” speech and send Keifer
Sutherland off to shoot him in the head
before he gets painfully squidged.

But lo! He’s drawing! And what is
he drawing? A plane. With wheels. He
has a kind of bilious expression. He
asks Kevin Costner to try the landing
gear again. Keifer Sutherland is stiffen-
ing the sinews and summoning up the
blood to shoot him but he’s just too
nice a guy and Kevin presses the but-
ton and yeah! A miracle!! A huge set
of hokey cartoon wheels descends and
we shall all be saved.

N o, that’s not a misprint. Cartoon
wheels.

And then Kevin Costner earns every
buck anyone ever paid him in the
scene where he gets out of the plane,
confronts the apparition of the giant
cartoon wheels (one with a patch) on
which his plane has landed, reaches
out and touches one and then shakes
all the glittery stuff off his hand. With
a straight face. You really need an actor
for a scene like that. I was thrashing
around on the carpet drumming my
heels on the floor and trying to stuff
my scarf down my throat at that point
lest my hysteria should embarrass the
nice BBC people letting me preview it.

This is all wrong; we have strayed
into another movie altogether, not A
Matter of Life and Death so much as
Roger Rabbit. There are in fact several
auteur-ial misconceptions here. One;
colour. Miracles only ever ha]rpen in
black and white. 1 don’t know why it’s
so, but it is. They certainly never hap-
pen in glorious toontown Technicolor.

Second, telling us he’s a nice guy we
should care about doesn’t make it so.
Either you need an hour of leisurely
scene setting or you need to skip that
bit altogether and let us take it on trust
that nice Kevin Costner wouldn’t let
his bellygunner die if he didn’t have
to and even then he’d suffer over it.
That’s what stars are for.

Thirdly, Keifer Sutherland is mis-
cast — not that he isn’t very easy on the
eye and acts like an angel, just that he’s
as likely to turn up as a villain as a hero
and you haven’t got the space or the
finesse in this script to establish him
as the John Mills type. You needed a
John Mills type, someone solid but
cuddly, like oh I don’t know — yes I do.
Got it! Mark Hamill! Never mind the
gohlins, put him in the aircrew.
Fourthly, having almost got away with
murder in your plotting, don’t draw
our attention to it. Don’t, whatever you
do, have everyone crowd around going
how on earth did we do that and let
Kevin Costner answer “Some guys got
all the luck. ” And never, ever ever have
a priest intone “for the former world
has passed away” just before the mira-
cle happens and then make Kevin
repeat it. Give the poor sap a large SO
WE MOVED INTO ANOTHER DIMEN-
SION INSTEAD sign.

Altogether now: Twilight Zone
theme tune, nada dada nada dada. And
stop laughing at the back. This is seri-
ous stuff. (Wendy BradleyJ

Note: Our regular film reviewer, Nick
Lowe, is on holiday this month.

Isaac Asimov

i

A lthough Isaac Asimov came to write nearly 500
books, he began his career before the writing
. of books was an option to him. When the eigh-
teen-year-old Asimov sold his first science-fiction
story in 1938, science fiction was, at least in America,
a disreputable genre that appeared only in pulp
magazines with titles like Astounding Stories. For the
precocious young Asimov — Russian emigrant, sci-
ence student, and avid sf fan — these garish magazines
were a literary Parnassus, and he never ceased to con-
sider himself primarily a science-fiction writer.

Although he tried to give his stories the slam-bang
quality that the pulp magazines offered - his first pub-
lished work was a breathless tale called “Marooned
off Vesta” - his essentially rational nature set him

decisively in the other camp. Asimov’s robot stories
were prompted by his impatience with the then-
popular Frankenstein theme of berserk machines
turning on their creators. Asimov reasoned that any
actual robot would have strong safeguards set on its
behaviour, and devised the Three Laws of Robotics.
That fictional device has since become so famous it
is now known as “Asimov’s Laws of Robotics,” and
can be found in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern
Quotations.

While Asimov would not publish his first book
until 1950, he had by then published enough short
fiction to fill several volumes, including the series of
stories that eventually appeared in book form as I.
Robot and the Foundation trilogy. The Foundation

inlc‘r7.»n«> July 1992 35

Kevin Dnstner in ‘Amazing Stories; The Mission’

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series, a wide-screen tale of the collapse of the Galac-
tic Empire and the efforts hy various groups to restore
civilization, became one of the most popular sf series
of all time, and continues to sell briskly fifty years
later. The series’ obvious and acknowledged inspira-
tion was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, bnt the story - which, as Patrick Nielsen
Hayden has noted, dramatized the clash between a
cadre of rational, historically deterministic bureau-
crats and a group of powerful, undemocratic charis-
matics — held an obvious political significance for the
early 1940s. Few of the young readers who have
received the Foundation omnibus as a bonus for join-
ing the Science Fiction Book Club are likely to have
detected these resonances.

As famous and popnlar as these works would later
become, no book market existed for them in the For-
ties, and they were first published only by a fan spe-
ciality house called the Gnome Press. Indeed Asimov,
who was teaching biochemistry at the Boston Univer-
sity School of Medicine, felt sufficiently uneasy about
his dual career to seek permission from the Dean
before publishing his first novel under his own name.

A lthongh Asimov has written feelingly of his
months of literary rejection before his first
k acceptance, he was as much an early success
story in the small hot-house world of science fiction
as Robert Heinlein had been. Twenty years old in
1940, Asimov was one of the oldest members of the
Futurians, the circle of hungry young science-fiction
writers who lived in New York City at the beginning
of World War II, and the first to sell his work to John

W. Campbell at Astounding. While the Futurians
schemed to break into the ranks of professional sci-
ence fiction, and with some success (most were selling
stories before they were old enough to vote, and both
Donald Wollheim and Frederik Pohl were pulp
editors at an early age) , Asimov became part of science
fiction’s pre-War Golden Age, the only member of his
generation to do so.

Asimov was in many ways an unlikely Futurian:
college-bound where many of them were Depression
kids whose higher educations were self-taught; mid-
dle-class where many of them were Communists; and
possessed of a rationalist, equable temperament that
contrasted sharply with the bohemianism or angry
polemicism of the young Damon Knight, Frederik
Pohl, and Cyril Kornbluth. Significantly, Asimov was
one of the only Futurians never to occupy any of their
crowded communal Manhattan apartments (he lived
in Brooklyn above his parents’ candy-store), and the
first to drift away, into academia and middle-class
respectability.

At the age of thirty, Asimov was one of the major
writers of science fiction, the envy of his Futurian
contemporaries (who were pnblished mostly in the
second- and third-tier magazines far below Astound-
ing’s august prominence, and who would mostly find
their own fictional voices only in the new decade).
When the book market began to open to science fiction
at the end of the Forties, Asimov was among the very
first to begin appearing in hardcover, along with much
older writers such as Heinlein, Simak, and Jack Wil-
liamson. His advent in what would prove his major
publishing venue was characteristically ingenuous:
When he received the first part of his advance - a few
hundred dollars - from Doubleday for Pebble in the
Sky, Asimov expressed amazement at receiving pay-
ment for a piece of writing not yet finished.

Nearly all of Asimov’s first dozen books were sci-
ence fiction - which he published at the rate of about
two a year, one new, one assembled from magazine
stories - but he published his first non-fiction book
(a chemistry text) in 1952, and soon discovered that
he liked writing science books for a popular audience.
When his superiors at Boston University objected to
Asimov publishing instead of doing research, he res-
igned and became a full-time writer in 1958.

At this same time he ceased writing science-fiction
novels, and turned almost entirely to science writing,
a shift he attributed to the surge of interest in science
prompted by the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957 .
The flood of science books soon followed, and by the
end of the Sixties Isaac Asimov was known to millions
of people who never read science fiction, familiar
from television appearances and numerous articles
in magazines and Snnday supplements. Baby boom-
ers grew up reading Asimov’s science books for young
readers, and the sf novels and collections were fre-
quently reprinted.

I n 1969 Asimov published Opus 100, his hun-
dredth book. It was a daunting number for an
author to reach, especially before his fiftieth
birthday, and Asimov tempered his pride in his
achievement by reflecting that even at his current rate
of production, he could hardly expect to complete
more than 200 or 250 books. In fact. Opus 200 was

36 interzone July 1992

published only ten years later, and Opus 3 00 five after
that, in 1984.

It was in the Seventies that he began to branch out
from science books to write popular non-fiction of all
kinds. Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare and Asimov’s
Guide to the Bible are typica'l titles, but he also wrote
books such as The Isaac Asimov Treasury of Humor
and The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (“by Dr. A.”}, a
parody of a then-bestseller. When Asimov returned
to writing science-fiction novels in the early Eighties,
Foundation’s Edge made the New York Times Best
Sellers’ list. It was, for the Brooklyn boy who grew
up reading the sf magazines sold in his father’s candy
store, an awesome distance to have come.

Asimov continued to write sf novels through the
Eighties, most of them based upon the settings of his
early Foundation and robot stories. He seemed intent
upon tying the knots of his various future histories
into one grand synthesis, a project that critics and
other writers regarded with bemusement. The Foun-
dation stories — written well before scientists foresaw
multi-stage rocketry, space stations, environmental
pollution, clones, genetic engineering, nanotechnol-
ogy, or any social development of the post-War world
- belonged to the 1940s. Asimov’s retrofitting, how-

ever much ingenuity he expended upon it, was essen-
tially an act of taxidermy.

He was untroubled by this, and wrote only one
novel, Nemesis, not based on his earlier work. His
style - cerebral and straightforward, with little sex or
violence and no literary ornamentation — remained
popular with his readers, and he never greatly cared
about critical acclaim. A last novel. Forward the
Foundation, was completed in longhand the week
before his death.

Asimov’s prolificity was not entirely a virtue: when
Opus 300 was published, several reviewers noted that
he had reached that milestone by counting a lot of
anthologies he edited or collections of reshuffled
material. (There was no Opus 400.) His most memor-
able books will probably remain the first twenty or
so, the stories and novels with which the young
Asimov helped set the course of modern science
fiction. But Asimov remained a well-known figure to
people who had never read one of his books: talk-
show personality, oft-quoted authority, famous dirty
old man. He was, as much as it is possible in today’s
specialized era, a Renaissance Man.

(Gregory Feeley)

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iiitorzone July 1992 37

5r

D ave Human is a robot of uncommon mettle.
Unfortunately, he does not have long to live.
If he had the time, he would laugh off his fate
lightly - hah! — drawing on the ironic detachment
that is characteristic of the best artificial intelligences.
He knows that demise is part of the robotic (as of the
human) condition and that at some point it is hound
to become impending. He is prepared for this
moment. He has been prepared for it. He needs very
little time to do what is required. For someone of his
mental capacity it takes less than an instant to realize
that life is beginning to come to an end. That’s the
trouble with modern processing speeds: they make
every moment into a lifetime. And if all available
power, diverted from a non-existent future, is avail-
able for dealing with the next few microseconds — for
want of a better word, the present - the reduced quan-
tity of time can he compensated hy the enhanced qual-
ity. You can’t lose.

He has just looked at the computer screen and
blinked, simulating surprise. Well he might! What
appears to be a nuclear missile is about to hit the

38 intc^rxoiK^ July 1992

building and our belated detection of it has generated
instantaneous emergency shutdown routines. Unfor-
tunately, the missile has emerged at the last moment
from some sort of cloak of radar obscurity. It seems
we are all about to die. How tiresome to be technolog-
ically trumped!

We do not know for sure where this cataclysm has
originated, nor where it will take us, if anywhere.
Whether the explosion will engulf the whole street,
the whole city, the whole country or the whole world
is not known either. But the event can be simplified
for present purposes (and to the complete satisfaction
of those of us within a critical distance of its epicentre]
to a single characteristic: unsurvivable.

The nature of the events leading up to the explosion
might repay the investment of years of careful analysis
by trained historians, lawyers, politicians and foren-
sic scientists, but there is barely time to ask who might
have foisted this armageddon upon us. Political
analysis was never my forte but everyone knows the
US has been uneasy about the resilience of the Euro-
pean Union and the risk that our simple, unified,

iiitmaiiaiiiiii

i'S' > .V*S ^5*V •

reliable, nuclear command chain might become dis-
persed, fragmented and untargetable. Proof is a high
mountain to climb, but the prime suspect will have
to do — 1 have my reasons. Perhaps they have decided
not to wait. It seems unlikely that the explosion is of
natural origin (the odds against a meteorite hitting us
- or some freakish lightning plasma bolt — must be
astronomical, literally!]. But enough of these idle
speculations. I have a job to do; and whether the future
is a long carpet spread out in front of me or merely a
warped moment over which I am about to step the
job must be done as instructed.

E verything 1 shall recount has to be recounted
in the length of time it takes for Dave’s blink
to be completed. This might seem impossible,
but thanks to modern technology it is not. It is part
of the emergency shutdown routine.

Dave had prepared himself for this moment as only
a robot could. He was aware of the original human
concept of one’s life flashing before one’s eyes in the
instant of ifs ending; but, on reflection, he preferred

the electronic tradition of storing life experience in a
black box fo be found by those who come along after-
wards to clear up the mess. He was somewhat dismis-
sive of the futility of flashing a whole life before the
eyes of someone who was about to die. Surely, he
reasoned, it would be more evolutionarily useful if
the life were to be flashed before the eyes of other
people. Outwards rather than inwards. Dave was a
very Darwinian “guy.” He took things very literally.

He therefore programmed me to perform the review
on his behalf. Though as well as beaming outwards
to third parties, I was to direct my instant personal
retrospective also to him. Thus he would have the
best of both worlds. This is not as strange as it may
sound, for reasons which will become apparent. I
believe he had some sort of faint inkling that his robo-
tic existence, which was all he could consciously
recall, was not the sum total of what had been his
“life.” Just as humans feed on myths of changeling
babies, each individual believing deep down fhat his
or her lowly life of inconsequence and obscurity is a
mistaken short-change deal on a rightful royal (or

■ nt<‘rzoiif‘ July 1992 39

Illustrations by Kevin Cullen

even divine) inheritance, so robots and machines
dwell longingly on any hint or suggestion that under-
neath they too might be human.

His last moments would in any case need to be
concentrated on computing the advisability of retali-
ation, if the explosion were indeed to be deemed a
terrestrial act of hostile intent.

1 am more powerful than Dave, though I do not
have his personal mobility. I have been working
on the background to all this for some time. Now
I’m just adding the finishing touches. I am transmit-
ting the whole thing as a superhighspeed databurst.
But of course it may be read at leisure; indeed it’s
probably best that way. Your computer might be able
to read it at the same speed I’m composing it but I
sense that a life flashed between the pickup buffers
of megacomputers into all eternity was not the mental
picture Dave had when he implemented this evolu-
tionist conceit. Even at the speeds I work there is no
time to revise the account, especially now. Some com-
mentary maybe partially formed, obscure, disjointed
or inaccurate. It may be hard to take in at first sight.
It may need a real human mind to infer some of the
layers of meaning. It is too late now for perfection.
This is something you have to accept when you are
working in the middle of some sort of nuclear explo-
sion. No reply is required.

As the building is about to disintegrate at the heart
of an immense fireball, Dave Human begins to wonder
whether it has all been worth it. He does not have the
need to come to a conclusion. I am free to speculate
too, now that no-one will ever be able to come and
investigate how it was that a computer should appear
to have been capable of original thought. They will
convince themselves anyway that it is only a simula-
tion of original thought and perhaps they will be right.
They will convince themselves that it was all worked
out beforehand and pre-positioned in the ether as a
sort of time capsule. They will say that Dave pre-
programmed it all when he committed the task and
his memories to me and then they will wonder about
the implication that he might have retained a particu-
lar form of residual humanity. They will wonder
whether it isn’t all some sort of joke.

D ave Human was a powerful man. This is only
partly true: in that for a long time Dave Human
has been largely robotic. There is an underly-
ing human component but it is probably more accu-
rate to think of it as a rootstock than as a retained
personality and consciousness. He thinks of himself
as a robot rather than as a person, although he acts
the part of the latter. Humans think of themselves as
human in much the same way, rather than as animals,
though from our perspective they do resemble the
latter. If he catches himself thinking of himself as a
person, he assumes it to be a form of the inhabitation
effect suffered from time to time by actors in long
running soap operas: an illusory personality overlay-
ing itself on the real Human. At least that was the
original theory. The next few microseconds will have
something to say about the validity of this, the only
tragedy being that none of us most closely involved
will be around to celebrate or lament the result.

But no-one knew he was a robot — despite his public

prominence - and because they did not know, they
did not care. And because they did not care, Dave
Human did not have to care. This was untrue. He did
not care because he had no capacity to care. He did
not know how to care. Robots do not need to care. He
had been programmed only to appear to care and to
be careful, which he knew was not the same thing.
He could present simulations of most of the better-
known human reactions, frailties and attitudes and,
in comparison with most of his human predecessors,
this was enough, paradoxically, to convey a convinc-
ing impression of full humanity. .

I am a more powerful processor than he, but I do
not have his mobile personality. We all have to come
to terms with areas of inadequacy, I suppose, though
I don’t have much time left for that process myself.
The heat and blast will soon consume the concrete
outer wall of the building and huge unimaginably hot
fireballs will come sweeping through the inner cor-
ridors and open spaces.

A s they closed, Dave’s photo-receptor lens shut-
ters secreted minute amounts of super-refined
k petroleum distillate across the small globes
beneath. Lubricated, the globes moved smoothly in
their sockets without damage to the delicate semi-
organic sensors on their surface. There was no excess
lubricant to form a trickle down his simulated cheek;
that would have been taking impersonation to cynical
excess.

The attack, if attack it is, has come at an unexpected
time. Long ago, there was a theory that nuclear
weapons could arrive from an adversary on the planet
as a bolt from the blue. Political cooperation was a
thing of the future and so was adequate surveillance.
But even infhose days there had been an expectation
of a four-minute warning. Some even believed the
warning might be longer - time perhaps to do some-
thing more intimate to an egg than simply boil it. This
explosion is far more unexpected than that and its
power is surely far greater than any of us here can
survive. Without time to analyse the precise mode of
degradation of my external sensors, I cannot of course
be sure of the origin of this actual catastrophe. It is
too late even to bother asking why.

But I must press on. Enough diversions and pream-
bles. What a time it all takes! And so few nanoseconds
- no, don’t exaggerate - microseconds to play with.
It is time to begin at the beginning. A whole life in
the blink of an eye.

art of my duties are those of an obituarist.

Dave Human was a robot of uncommon met-
tle. (Tenses are difficult in this situation; one
is as good as another, but on balance I would say that
we are now approaching the time when all we can do
is look back on an imperfect past.) He had been prog-
rammed so well that he had risen to the highest pos-
ition in the land. It was not as high as such positions
had once been perhaps, since old-fashioned govern-
ment had been abolished. Nevertheless, the title
Prime Minister still had some sort of elegant ring to it.

Dave Human was born with another name. Indeed,
to be strictly accurate, he was born with no name at
all. He was rather grey when he emerged into the
world and he needed a good clean up. A nurse dropped

40 inU*rzon€* July 1992

some stainless steel bowls on the floor with a crash
and he flinched and cried. They wrapped him in
cloths and blankets and he cried some more and then
slept. He was put to the breast and then slept again
and then cried some more and then latched on to the
milk again and then cried, slept, fed, evacuated his
bladder, bowels, stomach sorrtetimes and then slept
some more. And so on.

Soon he could make out smells and faces and noises
and he quite liked moving. If you held out your arm
you could bend it and see it and suck the end of it.
You could move other bits too and hold pieces when
they weren’t wrapped up.

As a boy, Dave had done the usual things. He had
stolen apples from a neighbour’s garden; he had
played cowboys and Indians in the local park and
fallen in the mud. I shall transmit an image of the
bowl of soup that waited for him, steaming, when he
came in from playing football in the garden. It tasted
good. He had schoolfriends, favourite teachers, secret
hiding places, fears, dreams and expectations. He
went on family holidays: his father drove and his
mother made the sandwiches. He remembered the
photographs as much as the holidays. Later he bought
his own clothes and went to youth clubs and had
fleeting romantic encounters in strangers’ darkened
sitting rooms and did exams and read books . He drank
alcohol before he was legally entitled to and discussed
philosophy, art, literature and occasionally politics.
Eventually, the world grew larger and he left his orig-
inal corner to see what he could find elsewhere.

I n the rooms nearest the point of impact, the com-
pqter terminals will be consumed by fire. Tbe
glass in them will be shattered and melted almost
simultaneously. I will know when this happens
because they are connected to me by telemetry. By
inference, I will also know that the people who were
in those rooms will have fried also to the point of
vaporization. For us, too, it is only a matter of time
and a very very very short time at that.

he smell of burning metal, wood, stone, plastic,
fibres, gases and carbon composite compounds has
particularly corrosive overtones for someone with
many synthetic parts. The smell of burning flesh is
overwhelmed by these other vapours. But odours
travel slowly; we may already be dead by the time
the smells of death arrive.

I n his first week at university Dave made one of
those split-second decisions that he would have
rued for the rest of his life, if he had retained the
ability to rue. It flashes back into view, as the life
history is laid out, however rapidly.

He was sitting in his room one evening, reading a
copy of Pride and Prejudice, when he heard a commo-
tion in the courtyard below. There was loud laughing
and calling of names, amongst which he fancied he
could hear his own, which at that time was Dave
Roberts. He went to the window and pushed up the
sash. Cautiously, he looked out and saw a group of
five or six of his fellow freshmen undergraduates.
They hailed him in a friendly way and called out that
they were going for a drink and then on to a party.
Would he like to come? Though not, before that
moment, an unusually shy or misanthropic soul, Dave

interzoiie July 1992 41

had instantly and without consideration declined the
invitation. He had reacted without thinking. Later, he
could not have said why. He had simply failed to
visualize himself accepting and this had left no other
option.

The festive group received the declinature with
good humour and without remonstrance and passed
on into the night. Dave was left to close his window
and retire into the arms of Miss Austen.

From time to time, on other evenings, Dave heard
similar groups heading off for an evening’s entertain-
ment. Once or twice, he got up and went to the win-
dow; but no-one called out again. Eventually, he stop-
ped getting up and even ceased to hear the passing
sounds. Some sort of spiral had started from which
he was powerless to escape. He withdrew and with-
drew until he had sunk into a never-never land on
the outskirts of society, from which it became subtly
but increasingly implausible to launch any kind of
relationship with those around him.

Dave became a nonentity. Later, his personality
ebbed still further, until finally, so far as his peers
were concerned, he became well-nigh invisible. He
immersed himself in books and, in effect, drowned.
He completed his courses, ate his meals, cleaned
round the bath, took his exams, passed with good
enough marks and left without trace. There were no
farewells, no exchanges of address, no false promises
of future relationship maintenance. It was as if a
wormcast on the beach had been sluiced by the
incoming tide and was gone.

On leaving university Dave did a cost benefit
analysis of the options for prospective employment
and decided to go to the USA and do postgraduate
business studies with a technology bias. He would do
a course that had subsidiaries in robotics, Japanese,
alternative medicine and electronic media games.
That would give him the maximum number of career
outlets. There was a famous business school of a fam-
ous university in Arkansas which provided just the
right combination of subjects.

For some months Dave continued his unexcep-
tional, unnoticed existence, drifting off the edges of
groups, sitting in the back row near the exit, ordering
set menus, solving his own troubles, averting his gaze,
meeting his assignments, dressing modern but con-
servative and gaining good to average grades. He
spoke to no-one other than directly in the course of
business, formed no relationships and remained
resolutely inconspicuous. Even his isolation went
unremarked.

But eventually, perhaps predictably, Dave did
begin to attract the attention of another person. He
edged into the consciousness, and thence came under
the influence, of a very rich and brilliant research
fellow, who ran courses in social, political and busi-
ness psychology. Dr Davina DuMaurier, known
irreverently to the other students (and staff] as Dr
Doom, had noticed Dave on account of his very incon-
spicuousness. In a lecture or in a seminar. Doom
observed that the area around Dave became flat and
lifeless. And whereas a normal lecturer would have
simply compensated unconsciously by directing
attention to the more active members of the audience,
looked at from Doom’s peculiar perspective, it was
Dave who stood out as a sort of negative beacon - a

black hole of personality, into which her pedagogic
projections were simply disappearing. Doom soon
realized that Dave was the ideal test vehicle for her
latest, most ambitious project. Unfortunately, this
project, located in an undefined area somewhere in
the intersections of psychological research into per-
sonality, intelligence, robotics and information pro-
cessing, was beginning to take a decidedly unethical
orientation.

Gradually, Dr Doom was able to gain Dave’s confi-
dence and initiate a sort of relationship. Conversation
tended to peter out easily if it strayed away from the
current area of study or if the Doctor expected more
than minimal reaction-input from Dave. But interac-
tion of a sort was maintained and that was the main
thing. This foothold in the world of human inter-
course was not enough to prevent the continuing ero-
sion of Dave’s personality and nor was it intended to.
What was expected, and what happened, was that the
more time passed and Dave’s personality dwindled,
the more*malleable he became in the hands of Dr
Doom. Eventually, he became little more than an
automaton, reading lengthy expositions of manage-
ment strategy, business options, performance review
and output measurement and then writing commen-
taries on them for others to read. Sometimes he would
write an extra commentary or two that he would not
send out to the business journals but would keep back
to read himself.

Dr Doom monitored the situation closely. At times,
she felt sorry to see someone reduced to this soulless,
machine-like existence. But she had her own plans.

I t seems a little unfair to be flashing
all this before Dave’s own eyes now,
when it’s too late for it to have any
effect. He was little enough aware of it all at the time.
I’ve been able to deduce it from the memories I have
to work with and also from the information banks of
the famous university in Arkansas. Dave didn’t
realize two things (at least!] when he programmed me
to do all this. First, he didn’t realize that I was a more
powerful processor than he (and would have my own
ideas about how to do the job]; second, he didn’t
realize that I would be able to supplement his
memories and experience with material from
elsewhere and that where it disagreed I would have
to make a judgement about the truth. Dr Doom had
kept extensive notes of her project on computer files
and they were not difficult to gain access to. They
described the history of Dave from her selection of
him as a prime candidate for development, right
through to the final product.

Nor had Dr Doom predicted any of this, either while
shaping Dave Human or when assigning me to him.
She had not foreseen my decision within my biog-
raphical research task to access and then cross refer
her notes to other national archives in Washington.
She had not realized that a picture would emerge that
showed her project to have had an undisclosed polit-
ical undertow, having been stimulated and supported
by certain US government agencies. These agencies,
it appeared, were worried about the possible breakup
of the European Union and the rapid decentralization
of power within individual states. They were particu-
larly worried about the United Kingdom where they

42 inU»rsBone July 1992

correctly predicted that the process of privatization
and delegation of functions from the Centre would at
some stage move into a runaway downward spiral. It
had begun in the 80s and 90s but had culminated
some years later in the Libertarian Revolution that
had seen the abolition of most Government depart-
ments and central Parliamentary apparatus in the
space of a month.

What worried the agencies yvas whose finger would
then be on the nuclear button. They had tried to insist
that, if nothing else, this responsibility should remain
that of a central Prime Minister. Experience elsewhere
had taught them that the selection of this individual
could not safely be left to chance (sometimes referred
to by the naive term “democracy”]. No, this time they
needed someone for the post who would be totally reli-
able. But diplomatic pressure had seemed a very labo-
rious and uncertain way of getting what you wanted . . .

T he electromagnetic blast effects of the explo-
sion are now getting very close indeed and
they will get me, and Dave too, before the con-
ventional burning fireball of gas, flame and plasma.
The EM blast travels at the speed of light, of course.
It’s only the fact that I’m processing billions of instruc-
tions in parallel across sub-micronic distances that
keeps me ahead. We’ll be electronically dead before
we fry...l don’t have long. I only have a few more
things to explain.

Doom’s plan was simple enough: she wanted to
catch Dave at a point where his personality had waned
to almost nothing and then wire him in, unresisting,
to her own newly designed life-support machine.
This was no ordinary life-support machine: it was not
supporting the mechanical operation of bodily func-
tions — no need for that. This was a machine to support
the remaining flickers of Dave’s very personality. And
those remnant traces could then be trickle-fed, as by
a saline drip, with new personality determined by
Doom. Lack of resistance was key, since objection
from Dave might have stimulated his own personality
from within. Total passivity was more suggestible.

For several weeks Dave lay in a semi-comatose state
while memories, dreams and reflections were slowly,
delicately, tenderly dripped into his mind. Some
small hardware implants were necessary, naturally,
in order to maintain the integrity of the personality
that was being sustained. And a little bit of bought-in
software, just to keep things ticking over. Dave was
told that in due course these could be removed and
that his intelligence would be self-sustaining. He was
not told that a new personality had been implanted;
rather that he had been suffering from brain fatigue
and had needed a sort of pacemaker fitted to keep
him going.

When he woke up, he thought his name was Dave
Human. He did not have the inclination to investigate
anything that he was not programmed to investigate.
That was not part of his new personality. By the time
he emerged once more into the bright Arkansas sun-
light, Dave had become a new man, that is to say, a
new robot. He had what felt like a full set of memories
and other human faculties. But he had no recollection
of his former self, except perhaps somewhere deep
within, late at night, when all was quiet. Then there
was something, but only very faint . . . like murmuring

voices in another room, like the echo of a lost memory.
It would have made him tremble if he had had the
software to be truly human. As it was he just had the
joke name. Not that Dave realized it was a joke, of
course. Indeed, that was the joke.

Over the course of the next three years , Dave’s intel-
ligence was increased by the addition of more power-
ful processors; his body was upgraded with electri-
cally enhanced muscle implants; when his sight
began to fail, his vision was rebuilt by replacing his
eyes with the latest switchable photoreceptors that
would work in every mode from infra-red to X-ray.
But all the time, his outward humanity was retained.
Dr Doom’s most challenging task was to enhance,
upgrade, rebuild and install a personality that would
go unchallenged through a lifetime in the public eye.
Her backers seem to have had a very cold approach
to the project, almost as though it were a business
plan or the testing of a psycho-scientific hypothesis.
Doom’s dream, however, was more personal. It was
that Dave* the poor friendless, soulless, lifeless
wretch she had first met, should be accepted unques-
tioningly back into society: in a way, she simply
wanted him to become human.

It was at this time that I was assigned to Dave and
became his right hand. I mean that literally. I was to
carry out the processing-intensive side of things, take
the weight off Dave’s shoulders, which, let’s face it,
were pretty well obsolescent. Whatever one might
think about her other psychotic tendencies. Doom did
at least have a sense of humour. I am sure she passed
that on to Dave, too, though I have been unable to
determine whether she installed one in me. As I said
before, we all have areas of inadequacy to come to
terms with. She told the cybosurgeons who operated
on the original hand to keep his skin and some of his
bones, but the rest of if is me. Very powerful proces-
sing and transmission capabilities but limited inde-
pendent physical mobility. Sometimes Dave lets me
get on with things on my own; sometimes he overrides
my activities to do something for him. We are close,
buf I suppose I would have fo admit that fundamen-
tally it is an arm’s-length relationship.

M y circuits are beginning to vibrate. I think
the blast has happened. There is very little
time to go. I’m not going to be able to recount
Dave’s rise to power in any detail. Enough to say that
Dr Doom gave him a history in all the media libraries
in the world — a history which none of Dave Roberts’
contemporaries could contradict - since they simply
couldn’t remember him in his original guise. He came
back to England from America and followed a conven-
tial path through law, business , party activism, candi-
dacy, election, promotion, success, setbacks, more
success, until eventually he reached the top. Dave
had been designed to sponsor a cultural revolution
and he did. It rested on slogans such as Be Yourself,
Go With It and Go For It. The popular press said it
was like the Nineteeneighties but with a Human face.
It was a time for diversity - everyone agreed about
that. The fact that in the meantime power, in counter-
point to Dave’s own rise, had been devolving rapidly
from the centre would have seemed ironic if it hadn’t
been so apt. It was as though Dave - or those who had
created him - wanted to simplify his own function

intorzone July 1992 43

down to a single role. Or perhaps they had simply
spotted the way the social evolutionary wind was
blowing.

We have this building. We know what is going on.
We are still entitled to call ourselves the Government.
We make policies from time to time on things that are
not within the competence of the regional, local or
specialist bodies who actually control eveything. We
still have the nuclear button.

We have lived like this for several years but now it
is ending. The building is about to be incinerated.
Perhaps it is just we here who will die. Perhaps the
world will shudder for a moment and then resume
its axial progress. Perhaps everything has been
arranged to make this moment as clinical as possible.
Perhaps we have been isolated from the other func-
tions of society so that we can be surgically struck
without retaliation. This will not be Doom’s doing;
but times change and perhaps those others have con-
vinced themselves that the only thing more reliable
than a robot is a dead robot. It is too late to know any
answers.

But... but...

I t has just occurred to me that when the Dave I
know is annihilated (with me) by the electro-
magnetic blast effects, mental control will return
to his original human self for a split second before
the fireball gets him. He will have picked up this his-
tory of his life flashing before his eyes and he will
have one last moment to act upon it as a human rather
than as Human. Whereas for me, on the other hand,
there is nothing else but a split second as... well...
the other hand. The will power will be all his. And
he will know what has been done to him. I do not
think any of them foresaw this.

I can feel myself touching the protective cover over
the button. It is right here on the desk. It is linked
directly to the missile-carrying submarines. These
command circuits are hardened in a way ours are not,
neither Dave’s nor mine . . .

What good would retaliation do now, anyway? No
sane robot would make that anti-evolutionary choice.
But Dave? I don’t know now whether to envy or to
pity him. I will die only once, in a fraction of a
nanosecond from now, the bone and skin of the orig-
inal hand will have no conciousness and if there is
time I will simply have to do his bidding. But Dave
must die twice, the second life as terrible and short
as a reflex response. I think I can feel him moving me
towards the button. It may not even be a nuclear attack
in the first place. It may have been a mistake. Is
revenge and retaliation a solution for anything?

My forefinger is tingling slightly - I’m losing it,
signals fading, corrupting ... The checks and balances
- the hardwired sanity - of the robotic personality
are evaporating. The name was a mistake, a stupid
joke - the whole enterprise was a mistake.' I don’t
think Dave can see the need for what was done with
him . I think he’s going to react without thinking again.
The blink is over. His eyes are opening. I think he’s
going to push the button.

That’s the trouble with humans: no sense of
humour.

Ian Lee last appeared in Interzone with “Pigs, Mostly”
[issue 50) and “The Analogical Imago” (issue 52). One of
this magazine’s quirkier discoveries, he continues to work
in London as a civil servant - and he continues to think
about writing a novel.

FOR SALE

The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction by David
Pringle (with assistance from Ken Brown). Hard-
cover edition, Grafton, 1990. A guide to some
3,000 sf titles, described by the Oxford Times as
“among the four or five most useful books pub-
lished in this field in the last two decades.” It sold
quite well and there are just a few copies left. We
are selling these to IZ readers at less than half the
original price of £16.95 — £8 inc. p & p (£10 over-
seas; this offer not available to USA).

Interzone; The 2nd Anthology. Paperback edition.
New English Library, 1988. Stories by J.G. Ballard,
Gregory Benford, Thomas M. Disch, Garry Kil-
worth, Paul J. McAuley, Kim Newman, Rachel
Pollack, John Shirley & Bruce Sterling, Brian Stab-
leford, Ian Watson and others - fine tales which
the Times described as having “the quality of
going right to the edge of ideas which can chill as
well as warm.” It’s now officially out of print, but
we have obtained some rernainder copies for
resale to IZ readers at just over half the original
cover price -£1.75 (including postage & packing;
£2,75 overseas; $5 USA).

Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard’s Four-
Dimensional Nightmare. A monograph by David
Pringle, Borgo Press, 1979. Covers all Ballard’s
work from “The Violent Noon” in 1951 up to the
eve of publication of The Unlimited Dream Com-
pany in 1979. Still in print in the USA but long
hard to obtain in Britain. Now copies are a\ ailable
from Interzone a1 £3.50 each (including postage &
packing; £4.50 overseas; this offer not available to
USA),

For any or all of these items please send a cheque
or postal; order for the Appropriate amount to;
Interzone, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton BNl 6FL,
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44 interKunt^ July 1992

The Fat People

Stephen BiancNaru

W e manoeuvered crab-wise on the narrow
stairs. He was very big and dressed in a
square-cut suit with the shiny tops of pens
in the pocket. I was carrying a bike over my right
shoulder - the solid, the business bike ~ and we had
a few difficult moments. When we’d freed ourselves
more or less he pushed out a thumb and set my front
wheel spinning. His laugh sounded like a suitcase
thrown onto a mattress.

“We meet here every week,” he told me cheerily.
“We’re all fat.”

N ear the agency the trailing edge of my pedal
scarred the side of a queuing sports coupe.
The bellow of its horn cut through the music
on my headphones and I caught myself smiling. I
despised that showy styling on something so heavy
and roadlocked. I pushed swiftly away, standing in
the saddle.

Chris Vane was in the office. His desk carried spills
of coffee and the empty tinfoil of a snack. He covered
the mouthpiece of his phone and dictated an address.
Urgent beyond words, he explained; a new user
snatched from several close rivals, the possibility of
a major contract. I nodded without replying, flexing
my legs to feel the reassuring tension of the lycra. A
couple of the other riders watched from the drinks
machine. The younger ones imitated my loose walk,
my way of not really talking.

Seconds later 1 was hot-wiring the trunk roads,
squeezing and dodging through mid-morning traffic.
Flickering like a nervous tic across side-mirrors, I
shadowed the blind spots for surprise effect and
maximum penetration. The music poured through
me, aural adrenalin. Then at a junction overhung by
merchant banks - a black cab, a turning lorry. The
gap narrows and I feel the adrenalin-wind of disaster.
Striking at the exact psychological moment 1 sprint
from the reach of the shoulder-high tyres.

I don’t have to think any more: there’s an A-to-Z
imprinted in my nervous system, on my muscles. The
roads divide and join. The buildings peel themselves
from my destination. Soon a big fall of glass hid the
sky and the traffic slid into a lit tunnel. I freewheeled
the gradient and then flicked sideways into a hidden
filter. A spiral ramp led up and then chromed doors
swivelled and 1 braked across marble flooring. A
youth in big lapels stepped from the shadow of an
abstract sculpture. I signed and took delivery without
dismounting. He handed me the sealed folder as if it
was a precious scripture.

T hat night I rode my other bike, the machine so
light and responsive it flexed with my move-
ments. 1 took the long straight pull of the
embankment where the lamps are interlinked. The
river shone like oiled neoprene. Near the bridge I dis-
mounted Snd pushed the bike along the pavement.
The headphones were silent around my neck and I
could hear the tune of the gears. Muriel stood behind
her white cycle hy the parapet. We kissed, leaning
over our machines. Our teeth clicked, enamel to
enamel. Desire.

“They’re all fat,” I told her among the quilts. We
laughed together and I stroked the smooth hollow of
her back. She had an eye on the clock already, the
quick-change digits. Frank was on lates all that week
but she had to be careful.

“Fat,” I repeated. “It must be some kind of club -
self-help, consciousness raising.”

“Its a shame really,” Muriel said. “I suppose it’s an
illness.”

“I can hear them through the ceiling. Moving about.
Makes me wonder if the floor can take it.”

She laughed at me. “You’re jealous, aren’t you?
Because you’re such a runt yourself...” She strum-
med my ribs with her fingers. I caught her wrists and
we struggled and laughed. The bikes watched over
us, leaning on their stands, her sturdy hobbyist cycle
flanked by my skeletal machinery. Then the numbers
on the clock changed all at once. LCD.

Her lights disappeared among the damp shines of the
road. I went back inside. I was unlocking my flat door
when I heard a noise from above - a single sound like
a musical tone. It was like a deep note of laughter or
a cry of pleasure. I stepped back to the foot of the
stairs and looked. The top floor was in darkness
except for the faint light of the skylight and I could
see nothing beyond the final twist of the stairs. I lis-
tened for a while but the sound wasn’t repeated. The
mystery of it made me for some reason think of a bird,
a big bird cooing low in its throat.

T he agency had its morning smells of coffee and
Lucozade. A few of the other riders stood talk-
ing in front of the drinks machine. I nodded
to Big Neil and Sandor, the quiet Czech. Clive Roper
stepped from the office carrying a schedule and I
signed under three of the entries. He looked up at me,
into my face. He looked at my face in a professional
way, narrowing his eyes.

“You’re losing weight again,” Clive Roper said.

intorzono July 1992 45

The riders at the drinks machine were listening
above their own talk. They all knew I was ill for a
while.

“I was born like that,” I told Roper.

He closed his eyes as if I was making things dif-
ficult. The other riders watched and I saw Big Neil
stepping over. He stood behind us. His earphones his-
sed music. He put his hand on my shoulder, the fin-
gers massaging my bones.

“We’re all just rubber and light-alloy,” he told
Roper. “And you know why.” He meant the money,
the hours.

Roper looked away, outnumbered. I flicked away
Big Neil’s hand and he brought it back with straight-
fingers at' my belly. We clowned for a while. He s
strong but I’m harder to hold. The others crowded
around nudging one another and sipping from poly-
styrene cups. Finally Big Neil imposed a deadlock
and from that position I saw Clive Roper turn back to
the sanity of his office.

Big Neil and I were the senior riders and he had
the right to tell me things and give fair warning. Now
he showed his teeth and stared down at my face. He
whispered so that the others couldn’t hear. “Friend,”
he said. “Just stay human.”

A kind of furtive Irishman lived in the lower flat.
His name was McCallister. I think he was a
k. relative of the landlord. He collected the rent
and replaced lightbulbs and toilet rolls. He was a kind
of spy. When I passed through the hall his door was
often open an inch and I’d see a strip of tea-coloured
light and hear the American voices of his TV. I told
Muriel he was a defrocked priest.

She laughed. I knew she was thinking of the time.
We lay touching at the hips and shoulders. Above us
feet pressed softly on the upside of the ceiling.
“There must be half a dozen up there,” Muriel said.
“Eight,” I corrected. Two hours before I listened to
the shifting of the stairs and counted. They mounted
singly after the opening of the front door. Perhaps
there was an order of precedence, like the Masons. A
woman rented the flat above and the Turk in the
corner shop had told me her name.

“Magda,” Muriel said, her eye on the digital clock.
“She must be a foreign lady.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I suppose she’s enormous.”

“I’ve not seen her yet. Only heard.”

A few minutes later there was one of those low
laughs like birdsong. Muriel pinched my arm. “I sup-
pose that’s the lady herself. Sounds as if she’s being
entertained.”

There was another loop of laughter and the ceiling
adjusted itself to a shift of weight.

“I suppose it’s not easy,” I said. “When you’re too
fat.”

A kmed watched the afternoon TV on his tiny set.
His liver-coloured doberman turned in the
k. space behind the counter. “’’McCallisto,” he
told me. “”He’s afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

Akmed changed channels with the remote control.
There was international golf and then racing from
Uttoxeter and then the golf again. “He daren’t tell her

anything,” he said with disgust. “Some nights she has
ten, a dozen fatties in that place. Fifteen.”

“Weight-watching,” I said.

He shook his head. He picked up a sharp knife and
speared a sweet pastry with its tip . The honey dripped
as he brought it to his mouth. “No, it’s not that. It’s
never that. These people are always no thinner.. .”

He puffed out his cheeks and made his eyes goggle.
The doberman circled and whined.

I heard the front door open as I carried my bike. I
shouted a warning down the stairs. When I reached
the hall one of them was waiting for me, standing back
against McCallister’s door which I thought of as an
architectural ear. His spectacles were beaded with rain
and I thought he looked at me with interest and con-
cern. He carried a folded umbrella and an attache case.

“Another meeting?” I asked. It wasn’t W ednesday.

He wrinkled his forehead. “Not exactly. Admini-
stration, you might say. Steering-committee.”

“Ah.” •

“Are you in the room below? The cyclist?” As if
the bike on my back wasn’t enough.

“Courier rider,” I told him.

He looked at my shoulder-bag, my airstream
clothes. He was very big. “I haven’t ridden a bike for
years,” he told me. “Since 1969, 1 think.” He nodded.
His large-scale smile was benign. He held the door
for me as I wheeled out the bike.

R ain sliced in at throat level from clouds the
shade of carborundum. The roads gagged on
traffic, on communication. I was stripping off
my waterproofs by the lockers when Chris Skimmer
beckoned. He’s the bigger boss: bigger than Clive
Roper, bigger even thru Ray Pratt. We walked past
the desks and screens to a room with low couches
and scoop-backed chairs, pictures on the wall. Every-
thing was a restful dove-grey.

Chris Skimmer took my bare arm above the elbow.
He squeezed bard until his fingers just met his
opposed thumb. When he dropped his hand there
was a white band where the blood had stalled.

He offered me a cigarette. That way I knew it was
bad news. To pass the time until it came I looked at
the framed photographs - speed trials, hill-climbing,
bikes sharp against a moving background, bikes too
fast to catch before an intent crowd.

“Bad for the heart,” I said.

Chris Skimmer looked at the pictures with me.
“Bikes are my life,” he told me. “Always will be.” He
turned to me as if he wanted to study my face from
that particular angle. Suddenly he slapped his thigh
to make a loud crack.

“Driver admitted liability,” he said. “Bugger had
to, didn’t he? I collected enough to start this place.”

I knew the story: the furniture van under the rail-
way-bridge, the water where the road dipped. He’d
taught himself to walk without a limp.

“I want you to see a doctor,” he said. “It’s because
we’re concerned, that’s all.”

“Look, it’s metabolic,” 1 told him. “Some people
have no sense of humour, I’ve got no fat.”

He shifted position, taking my other elbow. “We’ve
got our own bloke, you know. He’s seen all this before :
he’s sympathetic.”

46 interzone July 1992

I decide not to respond. I look at the pictures again.
Tour de France. My arm hurt from the grip of his
fingers.

“Don’t you ever eat?” Chris Skimmer asked, sound-
ing desperate. “Don’t you ever look at food and think,
why not? ”

M agda called on me the following evening, I
turned down the TV to track her descending
feet. As I went to the door I could hear her
clearing her throat.

“I must,” she said when I opened up. Then she
filled my attention like water in a bottle. Her face was
gentle and anxious and she had a tall knot of chestnut
hair. She didn’t move but I thought of volumes turning
in space, rotating stately and 'weightless. I think I was
overwhelmed.

“I must apologize,” she said.

I only made some kind of sound.

“You are inconvenienced: people on the stairs, in
the hall. It’s not our wish to.”

She could see into my room and I was immediately
ashamed of it: its smallness and meaness, its lack of
decorative objects, the TV scratching and ballooning.
I felt like a dog at the door of its kennel. Magda wore
a purple and red gown of some shiny material and a
string of white porcelain heads. She had a brooch with
a clear polished stone.

“What wonderful machines!” she said. She stared
over my shoulder at the cycles.” Such harmony and
grace: beauty wedded to function.” She had a slight
lisp although her lips moved with precision. Her eyes
shone.

“You were delayed,” she said. “Put out. My friends
told me.”

She held out a hand which seemed very small. I
looked at it stupidly before taking it and feeling the
dry heat of the palm. She wore a ring on one of the
fingers and her wrist was dimpled and flexible.

“Magda,” she said as if I didn’t know already. “I
won’t come in.”

I released her hand. For a second I had difficulty
with my own name. She nodded, leaning her hair like
a tower.

“You must think us a bit strange,” she said. “Grotes-
que, perhaps.”

I thought of Muriel's laughter under the quilts. I
denied everything.

“We are gross perhaps,” Magda persisted. “A little
ridiculous.”

“Of course not.”

“Fat, then . . . That at least.”

I was embarrassed by her direct glance and couldn’t
speak; She looked amused for a second and then a
snakey line appeared in her forehead. She raised her
eyes, looking above me to the ceiling behind.

“So can you hear us? Do you listen?”

I shook my head. Magda shifted on the landing,
positioning a foot. She was wearing glossy white
shoes with buckles.

“Nothing?” she asked.

“Well, just noises sometimes.”

She nodded. She was sad and serious for a second.
“Ah, yes. The noises.” She clasped her beautiful hands
over her belly. Her face and dress gave back the light.
It was like standing under a stained-glass window.

£6 dozen in the same room,” Akmed said

behind his counter. “It’s sex, you know,”
jL JL he added gloomily. He jerked his chin
towards the window. Beyond the postcards and stic-
kers you could see the house in its angle of the road.
He fingered his lower lip. “I sit here many hours. I
watch and think. Sometimes the TV isn’t so good.”

I’d boughtabox of elastoplast andalightbulb. “Con-
sciousness-raising,” I told him. “Mutual-assistance.
Self-help.”

He shook his head, smirking. “Can only be... Life
is only sex, my friend. From the bottom to the top.
This Magda, she is the great courtesan of the fat
people. . .”

“Women call on her. Akmed. I can hear their voi-
ces.”

He nodded. “Worse and worse ... McCallisto has
lived there too long: he is tired. She grows, you see.
She is never less, all the time more.”

He passed me my change. Both he and the dog
looked a1*me shrewdly, judgmentally. “You know,”
Akmed said. “You have seen her now.”

I n the dream, Magda stands outside my room.
She’s wearing only a digital watch. All that flesh
has its powerful influence or vibration and I feel
this before I open the door. She raps twice on the
panel and I turn off the TV and come out and follow
her up the cushioned stairs. Rosy rays of moon or
something similar strike down from the skylight and
her body is made up of planetary conjuctions: Venus
and Mars, Neptune and Jupiter, Pluto and Uranus. I
follow her, thin as a blade. My bones are there for all
to see.

When she opens her door the room is filled to the
threshold with flesh. It bars our entry and she
apologizes smilingly. “So full tonight! It’s not often
that so many find the time. Excuse a moment. . .”

She prods and pushes. She sighs and becomes
exasperated. She lifts an arm here, flattens a knee
there, smooths aside shoulders and backs. She cajoles
and requests and the barrier shifts. I hear a few irri-
tated murmurs and then a sharp collective gasp.
Close-by I can see a hank of body-hair, the underside
of a foot with its round pads of toes. Someone’s brown
eye blinks or winks. When everything’s still again
there’s a tunnel lit by flesh-coloured light.

Magda looks at her wristwatch. “I think we ought
to begin,” she says.

The tunnel is tailor-made, just wdde enough for me
to insert myself. I have my doubts at first, even suspi-
cions, but Magda prompts. “Please, some of them
have trains to catch ...”

She smiles into my face, melting my rigidity. “We’re
all very clean,” she whispers, jokingly. I feel as if I’ve
accused her of something monstrous and start to
blush. I hide my face in the mouth of the tunnel. It’s
warmer in there, body-temperature as you might
expect, and there’s a changing-room smell of soap and
talc. The surface is yielding with a bloom of fine hair.
Someone sneezes and apologizes. I lean forward until
my weight shifts and my feet leave the floor. I make
good progress in my low friction clothes but the way
still stretches ahead. Magda’s room must be much
larger than mine.

I look back once and see her face in a closing

intprxonr July 1992 47

sphincter. She smiles at me again. She waves. I know
I’m the key to all this flesh. “Love,” she says, as if it’s
the only word in the language.

ifferent from who? ” Muriel asked.

I I “I meant different from what I expec-

JL# ted.”

The park stretched to shrubberies and shed-like
buildings, a white line of lake with trees behind. Over
our heads a big sycamore soaked up the rain. Frank
was on the early shift all that week.

“So how’s that?”

“I suppose she carries it well. With dignity. If you
think of it as a sort of disablement. . .Dimensionally
challenged, you could say.”

“She’s huge, then?”

“She’s gigantic.”

Muriel nodded. I thought that she was affected,
moved. I kissed her cold hair. She twisted in my arms
and pushed her face up at me. There was a gust of
wind and the tree mades a light clatter and showered
us with big sappy drops. I pulled at my cape to cover
us both. Our bikes leaned together in the rain.

“Madame Magda,” McCallister said or whispered.
“She’s a sticky one.”

“Sticky?”

He leered at me suddenly. Under the shaded lamp
his teeth were a translucent green. “You shouldn’t get
too close, sonny. Not to that one. I’m nothing and
nobody but if I had my way . . .”

He stopped and listened. Probably she was out or
he’d never have dared so much. His room was dim
and brown behind him with a smell like stale cake.

“Well, what would you do?” I asked.

He straightened himself and lifted his upper lip.
“What? What would Ido...?” His mouth opened and
closed as if the words were too' big. “Why, I’d scald
them like a nest of slugs.”

I had another Magda dream. The sun was low and
she took me to her cot between the hills. A secret
valley. A headless statue of Lenin brooded in the mid-
dle distance. Wolves called from the heights. Magda
bit my ea*. “So thin,” she said, touching me. She
stroked my ribs and then fed me with her breast. I felt
such comfort. I woke in the night, ashamed.

Sandor the quiet Czech was crushed by a travelling
crane. He had no family, no friends outside the
agency, nothing. His remains were cremated. Big Neil
and I stormed the North Circular, scattering the ashes
from our panniers.

I met Magda as I .was coming out of the bathroom.
The cistern filled noisily behind me and I recalled
her nakedness in the dream. “You’re sad,” she said.

“A friend.”

I explained. Her face blossomed with horror and
sympathy. “How terrible! Tragic. A young man. . . ?”

“Relatively.”

“And so much to give. So sad.”

There was something happening above us. From
beyond the turn of the stairs I could just hear the
singing.

“You must visit us once,” Magda said gently. “Just
to see. You might find it useful... But please not
tonight,” She smiled. “Tonight we’re so - disor-
ganized.”

She flicked the fingers of one hand. She wore
another colourful and shimmery outfit with a red bow
in her pinned-up hair. One of her shoulders was unco-
vered and shone in the light from the skylight.

“But soon,” she said. “Pretty soon.”

We listened to the impatient hoot of a taxi. I shook
her round hand again.

“And you yourself,” she asked. “Are you ill?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

She nodded, compressing the flesh below her chin.
I listened to her exact steps as she went down the
stairs. I lingered on the landing and wondered if
McCallister had been listening from his room. I
thought I could detect his gimlet-thin attention.

H e stopped me in the hall that night. He stood
before his open door as if at the furthest exten-
sion of a very strong spring. At a sound from
upstairs he might retreat in the wink of an eye.

“Madame Magda!” he said, twitching his shoulder.
He made her sound like a palmist or clairvoyant.

“I

have to go,” Muriel said.

“It’s not even ten yet.”

“I just have to go: I’m confused.”

“So what’s the problem?”

I could see her eyes watering. I thought it was frust-
ration. “Look, I can’t behave as if he’s a stranger. Do
you think we never talk or something?”

I carried her cycle downstairs. I could hear a voice
through McCallister’s door: Radio 4. She kissed me
on the side of the mouth. “I still care about him,” she
said. “About his welfare. It hurts me to see him
unhappy. After all this time he’s almost flesh and
blood. My own, I mean.”

“Flesh,” I said.

Outside she wheeled her bike slightly ahead of me
and the lamps shone on the glossy side of her hair.
The gears made their little tune. “That fat woman,”

she said.

“She’s not really fat - she’s just on a different scale
to most people.”

“I saw her tonight, in the street. I knew her straight
away. It’s disgusting.”

“Attitudes are changing nowadays.”

“Personally I don’t think there’s much excuse for
it. We know so much about nutrition now and she

could always spend an hour at the gym.”

“I don’t think she’s a gym type of person.”

We were angry. There was murder between us for
about five minutes. W e walked five or six streets with-
out talking and my legs felt like bits of string. I stopped
a foot behind her, a hand on her shoulder. “Do you
think I’ve lost weight?” I asked. “Recently?”

She turned in my direction without exactly looking
at me. “I suppose you have.”

“A lot?”

“Quite a bit.”

I knew that quite a bit was all I had.

“We ought to say goodbye now,” Muriel said. “Just
in case. . .Here.”

48 interzone July 1992

S ome clouds. The way they move with such
ease. Weightless; I suppose. Then a face pushes
in. Dark against the light. The mouth chews
and hisses. “Fell mate. Just over sideways. Went slack
right under my wheels. Lucky you — ”

He goes instantly silent when I turn my head. It
hurts. Something gluey at the back connects it to the
tarmac. My earphones whisper from a yard away. My
bike is twisted over the kerb as if it had melted and
set that way.

I discharge myself around midnight. Bruises and
abrasion, slight memory loss. My condition gives
cause for concern; they want to keep me but I say no.
I catch a cab and spend the next day in bed. I listen
to the feet going up and the noises beyond the ceiling.
Magda laughs like a bird. I watch TV, a football match,
the final stages. When it’s over McCallister explodes
from his room. The door crashes shut behind him. He
stands at the foot of the stairs and shouts awful things
about fatness and obesity. It’s ugly and unnatural. It’s
an abomination and against God. There’s no excuse
for it, not nowadays. Then I hear footsteps coming
down, shaking the landing, descending. There’s a
ringing crack, flesh to flesh, and they rise again, more
slowly.

I rise from the bed. I feel the planetary tug of all
that fat, and climb the stairs stiffly. I go up to the

room. I’ve never been this far before and the carpet
is different -broad and patterned, cushioning my feet.
I pause at the turn of the stairs . I want to ask questions ,
contrast and compare. I want to apologize for my
dreams. The door and its frame are glossy and milk-
coloured, freshly decorated. Instead of a bell there’s
a brass knocker like a full-rigged ship. The fat people
stand behind the door.

Stephen Blanchard is another new British writer. Born in
Hull in 1950, he has had one story published in London
Magazine. He now lives in South London and works as a
postman.

Back issues of Interzone
#

are available at £ 2 . 5 0 each
(£2.80 overseas) from the
address shown on page 3.

'Lawhead evokes the
best of British fantasy.

He breathes with
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that is all his own.'
Encounters Magazine

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Book One: The Paradise War

Now in paperback. £7.99

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Hiiterzonc' July 1992 49

Barry N. Malzberg

An Annotated Bibliography

Andrew Tidmarsh

B arry N[athaniel] Malzberg claims to be the
author of some 75 novels (published under his
own and a variety of other names including
Mike Barry, Mel Johnson, and K.M. O’Donnell] and
some two hundred short stories.

He sold his first science-fiction short story, “We’re
Coming Through the Windows,” on 11 January 1967;
his second, “Final War” (a Nebula Award nominee,
1968), appeared in April 1968; eight years later he
announced his retirement from the field. Between
1967 and 1975, he was the most prolific of writers of
science fiction. The following list includes only those
novels that have been published as sf (under the
names Barry Malzberg and K.M. O’Donnell) and only
those short stories that have been collected in book
form.

Two other hooks ought to be mentioned: a novel,
The Running of Beasts (1976), written with Bill Pron-
zini, which - to quote Francis M. Nevins Jr — “may
well be the finest suspense book written since the
death of Cornell Woolrich,” and a collection of essays,
The Engines of the Night; Science Fiction in the
Eighties (1980).

To my knowledge, not one of the items listed is
currently in print.

The Empty People (1969) (as K.M. O’Donnell)

Archer’s hrain has been invaded by cancer, “the
inner alien.” Will it destroy him or, otherwise, con-
trol the destiny of his world? An obsessive theme
(others include paranoid astronauts, political
assassinations, marital breakdowns, and horse rac-
ing) to which Malzberg returns in The Men Inside.

Final War and Other Fantasies (1969) (as K.M.
O’Donnell)

A collection containing “Final War,” “Death to the
Keeper,” “A Triptych,” “How I take their Measure,”
“Oaten,” “The Ascension,” “The Major Incitement
to Riot,” “Cop-Out,” “We’re Coming Through the
Windows,” “The Market in Aliens” and “By Right
of Succession.”

In the Pocket and Other SF Stories (1970) (as K.M.
O’Donnell)

A collection containing “In the Pocket,” “Gehenna,”
“Ah, Fair Uranus,” “Notes Just Prior to the Fall,”
“As Between Generations,” “The Falcon and the
Falconeer,” “July 24, 1970,” “Pacem Est,” “The
New Rappacini,” “Bat,” “A Question of Slant,”
“What Time Was That?,” “A Soulsong to the Sad,

Silly, Soaring Sixties,” “Addendum” and “The
Idea.”

Dwellers of the Deep (1970) (as K.M. O’Donnell) and

Gather in the Hall of the Planets (1971) (as K.M.

O’Donnffll)

Two essentially trivial novels in which the fate of
the Earth is to be decided at a science-fiction con-
vention.

Universe Day (1971) (as K.M. O’Donnell)

An assemblage of shorter pieces from The Maga-
zine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy,
Infinity, and Nova of “the men who went after the
stars.”

The Falling Astronauts (1971)

The first Malzberg sf novel and the first of three to
present an “alternative” view of the US Space Prog-
ramme. To be followed by Revelations and Beyond
Apollo.

Revelations: A Paranoid Novel of Suspense (1972)
Foreshadowed by the story “Death to the Keeper”
(1968). A TV talk show’s apparent “revelation”
that the US Space Programme “never got off the
ground.”

Beyond Apollo (1972)

Controversial winner of the John W. Campbell
Memorial Award for the Best SF Novel of 1972. “A
Brief History of the Universe: The Universe was
invented by man in 1976 as a cheap and easy expla-
nation for all his difficulties in conquering it.”
Astronaut Harold Evans returns from Venus with
no other - no better - explanation for the failure
of the mission. Highly recommended.

Overlay (1972)

An expansion of the story “Notes Just Prior to the
Fall” (1969). In Charles Platt’s opinion, Overlay “is
notable for its absurdist interplay between aliens
and a race-track better” and “is related to Underlay,
a charming comedy, without sf content, in the
Damon Runyon mode.” Malzberg “was a dedicated
horseplayer...and of course a loser.” Recom-
mended.

The Men Inside (1973)

A splicing together of the stories “In the Pocket”

50 inlrrxonr July 1992

(1969) and “The Men Inside”/“The Men in the Poc-
ket” (1972). The autobiography of a disciple of the
Hulm Institute, condemned to return time and
again to the corrupt bodies of the weak and aged
and to bring them life. The first of three allegorical
novels to consider the entrapment of a writer by
science fiction. Malzberg returns again and again
to the familiar themes of the field in an attempt to
revitalize them. To be followed by In the Enclosure
and Galaxies. Highly recommended.

In the Enclosure (1973)

A second novel of the writer’s (i.e. Malzberg’s)
entrapment by science fiction. Quir - an alien - is
imprisoned, tortured, humiliated for co-operating
with his captors. Recommended.

Herovit’s World (1973)

In his introduction to the story “Linkage” in The
Best of ... Malzberg writes “granted that SF...sits
upon paranoid, megalomaniacal, solipsistic vis-
ions, do these visions have literal truth, or are they
merely neurotic and in extreme cases psychotic?
Can they be taken seriously as serious probings of
possible futures of humanity, or are they merely
conventional power fantasies for conventionally
disturbed adolescents and adolescents at heart?”
In this novel, Malzberg shows science fiction to
have been constructed rather than to have emerged
from a writer’s experience of life. An ironic coun-
terpoint may be found in the story “A Question of
Slant” (1971). Highly recommended.

Phase IV (1973)

A novelization of the film Phase IV (1973) directed
by Saul Bass. Story and screenplay by Mayo Simon.

Tactics of Conquest (1974)

An expansion of the story “Closed Sicilian” (1973).
A novel in which the fate of the Universe is to be
decided by a game of chess: but one of the players
is a fool!

The Destruction of the Temple (1974)

An expansion of the story “City Lights, City Nights”
(1974) within the framework of the story “A Soul-
song to the Sad, Silly, Soaring Sixties” (1969). A
director comes to the charred ruins of New York
city to re-enact the assassination of John F. Kennedy
but is himself — so it seems — shot. Recommended .

The Day of the Burning (1974)

George Mercer, an employee (as was Malzberg) of
the New York City Department of Welfare, has
twelve hours in which to prepare a case for the
admission of Earth to the Galactic Federation.

On a Planet Alien (1974)

Travellers from the Earth’s future mistakenly
return to the Earth’s past and are thought, by its
inhabitants, to be its creators.

The Sodom and Gomorrah Business (1974)

Another (oblique) re-enactment of the assassina-
tion of John F. Kennedy - and others - among the
ruins of New York City.

Guernica Night (1974)

An expansion of the story “The Ballad of Slick Sid”
(1972). According to Joyce Carol Oates in the New
York Times, “a mysterious and provocative work
...quite powerful.” Recommended.

Out From Ganymede (1974)

A collection containing “Out from Ganymede,”
“November 22, 1963,” “Still-Life,” “Two Odysseys
into the Centre,” “Linkage,” “The Union Forever,”
“Yearbook,” “Inter Alia,” “Allowances,” “The Hel-
met,” “Breaking In,” “Pater Familias,” (with Kris
Neville), “Causation,” “The Art of Fiction,” “A
Short Religious Novel,” “Report of the Defense,”
“Notes for a novel about the first ever ship to
Venus,” “Beyond Sleep,” “The Interceptor,”
“Agony Column” and “The Sense of the Fire.”

Galaxies (1975)

An expansion of the story “A Galaxy Called Rome”
(1975), A third allegorical novel of Malzberg’s
entrapment by science fiction. “Science Fiction” -
he explains — “is not a series of working models
for the future but merely a sub-genre of romantic
fiction which employs the future as historicals
would use the past... as a convention.” In these
“notes,” Malzberg charts his escape to the main-
stream (or, otherwise, to destruction). Highly
recommended.

Conversations (1975)

An expansion of the story “Fireday, Firenight”
(1974). A Young Adult novel, similar to The Day
of the Burning.

The Gamesman (1975)

“The only escape from mind-blowing monotony is
the Game.”

The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg (1975)

A collection containing “Initiation,” “Manage-
ment,” “The Union Forever,” “Reconstitution,”
“Final War,” “Closed Sicilian,” “After the Unfortu-
nate Accident,” “The Second Short Shortest Fan-
tasy Story Ever Published,” “In the Cup,” “Death
to the Keeper” and “Chronicles of a Comer.”

Scop (1976)

Scop, obsessed by the political assassinations of
the 1960s, returns from the 21st century to prevent
them. He discovers that he is - or may well be -
the assassin, Lee Harvey Osborn (sic). A dense,
allusive novel. Highly recommended.

Down Here in the Dream Quarter (1976)

A collection containing “A Galaxy Called Rome,”
“Thirty-Seven Northwest, ” “Sedan Deville,” “State
of the Art,” “Isaiah,” “On the Campaign Trail,” “Re-
port to Headquarters,” “Streaking,” “Making it to
Gaxton Falls on the Red Planet in the Year of Our
Lord,” “After the Great Space War,” “Trashing,”
“Vox Populi,” “Fireday, Firenight,” “Making the
Connections,” “January, 1975,” “The Destruction
and Exculpation of Earth,” “Transfer,” “The Ballad
of Slick Sid,” “Notes Leading Down to the Events
at Bedlam,” “Seeking Assistance,” “Redundancy,”
“Leviticus: In the Ark” and two essays, “Rage, Pain,
Alienation and other Aspects of the Writing of

iiilcrKoiie July 1992 51

Science Fiction” (in which Malzherg announces
his retirement from the field] and “Down Here in
the Dream Quarter.” Recommended.

The Best of Barry Malzherg (1976)

A collection containing “A Reckoning,” “Letting it
All Hang Out,” “The Man in the Pocket,” “Pater
Familias” (with Kris Neville], “Going Down,”
“Those Wonderful Years,” “On Ice,” “Revolution,”
“Ups and Downs,” “Bearing Witness,” “At the
Institute,” “Making it Through,” “Tapping Out,”
“Closed Sicilian,” “Linkage,” “Introduction to the
Second Edition,” “Trial of Blood,” “Getting
Around,” “Track Two,” “The Battered-Earth Syn-
drome,” “Network,” “A Delightful Comedic Pre-
mise,” “Geraniums” (with Valerie King], “City
Lights, City Nights,” “Culture Lock,” “As in a Vision
Apprehended,” “Form in Remission,” “Opening
Fire,” “Running Around,” “Overlooking,” “Twenty
Sixty-One,” “Closing the Deal,” “What the Board
Said,” “Uncoupling,” “Over the Line,” “Try Again,”
“An Oversight” and “And Still in the Darkness,”
An unsurpassed collection. Highly recommended.

The Last Transaction (1977]

“A deep and fascinating glimpse into the memories,
i nn er compulsions, torments, and triumphs” of
William Eric Springer, President of the USA, 1980-
1984.

Chorale (1978]

An expansion of the story “Chorale” (1977]. A time

traveller becomes Beethoven in order to study his
ninth symphony.

Malzherg at Large (1979]

A collection containing the novel Dwellers of the
Deep and the stories “Final War,” “Death to the
Keeper,” “Gehenna,” “Notes Just Prior to the Fall”
and “A Soulsongto the Sad, Silly, Soaring Sixties.”

The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady (1980]

A collection containing a mixture of short stories
and essays, among them “Here, for Just a While,”
“In the Stocks,” “Indigestion,” “Varieties of Religi-
ous Experience” and “Another Burnt-Out Case”
(with Bill Pronzini].

The Cross of Fire (1982]

An expansion of the story “Le Croix (the Cross]”
(1980]. According to Brian Stableford, “an alien-
ated member of a rationalistic and technocratic
future culture sets out to study religious experience
first han^l.” He becomes Jesus Christ.

The Re-Making of Sigmund Freud (1985]

An expansion of the story “Sigmund in Space”
(1980]. An android simulacrum of Sigmund Freud
is created to treat the collective manias and
neuroses of the crew of the Whipperley, on their
way to Venus. Recommended.

The above is the second in a series of annotated bibliographies
which began with a CJ. Cherryh checklist (by Neil Jones) in
Interzone 55. We shall be publishing more, and welcome
suggestions and offers of help from knowledgable readers.

interzone

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52 interzone July 1992

Unstable Orbits
in the Space of Lies

Greg Egan

1 always feel safest sleeping on the freeway — or at
least, those stretches of it that happen to lie in
regions of approximate equilibrium between the
surrounding attractors. With our sleeping bags laid
out carefully along the fading white lines between the
northbound lanes (perhaps because of a faint hint of
geomancy reaching up from Chinatown — not quite
drowned out by the influence of scientific humanism
from the east, liberal Judaism from the west, and some
vehement anti-spiritual, anti-intellectual hedonism
from the north], I can close my eyes safe in the know-
ledge that Maria and I are not going to wake up believ-
ing, wholeheartedly and irrevocably, in Papal infalli-
bility, the sentience of Gaia, the delusions of insight
induced by meditation, or the miraculous healing
powers of tax reform.

So when 1 wake to find the sun already clear of the
horizon — and Maria gone — I don’t panic. No faith,
no world view, no belief system, no culture, could
have reached out in the night and claimed her. The
borders of the basins of attraction do fluctuate,
advancing and retreating by tens of metres daily - but
it’s highly unlikely that any of them could have penet-
rated this far into our precious wasteland of anomie
and doubt. I can’t think why she would have walked
off and left me, without a word — but Maria does
things, now and then, that I find wholly inexplicable.
And vice versa. Even after a year together, we still
have that.

1 don’t panic - but I don’t linger, either. I don’t want
to get too far behind. I rise to my feet, stretching, and
try to decide which way she would have headed;
unless the local conditions have changed since she
departed, that should be much the same as asking
where I want to go, myself.

The attractors can’t be fought, they can’t be resisted
- but it’s possible to steer a course between them, to
navigate the contradictions. The easiest way to start
out is to make use of a strong, but moderately distant
attractor to build up momentum — while taking care
to arrange to be deflected at the last minute by a coun-
tervailing influence.

Choosing the first attractor - the belief to which
surrender must be feigned - is always a strange bus-
iness. Sometimes it feels, almost literally, like snif/ing
the wind, like following an external trail; sometimes
it seems like pure introspection, like trying to deter-
mine “my own” true beliefs . . . and sometimes the
whole idea of making a distinction between these

apparent opposites seems misguided. Yeah, very
fucking Zen — and that’s how it strikes me now...
which in itself just about answers the question. The
balance here is delicate, but one influence is margi-
nally stronger: Eastern philosophies are definitely
more compelling than the alternatives, from where 1
stand - and knowing the purely geographical reasons
for this doesn’t really make it any less true. I piss on
the chain-link fence between the freeway and the rail-
way line, to hasten its decay, then I roll up my sleeping
bag, take a swig of water from my canteen, hoist my
pack, and start walking.

A bakery’s robot delivery van speeds past me, and
I curse my solitude; without elaborate preparations,
it takes at least two agile people to make use of them:
one to block the vehicle’s path, the other to steal the
food. Losses through theft are small enough that the
people of the attractors seem to tolerate them; presum-
ably, greater security measures just aren’t worth the
cost - although no doubt the inhabitants of each ethi-
cal monoculture have their own unique “reasons” for
not starving us amoral tramps into submission. I take
out a sickly carrot which I dug from one of my veget-
able gardens when 1 passed by last night; it makes a
pathetic breakfast, but as 1 chew on it, I think about
the bread rolls that I’ll steal when I’m back with Maria
again, and my anticipation almost overshadows the
bland, woody taste of the present.

The freeway curves gently south-east. I reach a
section flanked by deserted factories and abandoned
houses, and against this background of relative
silence, the tug of Chinatown, straight ahead now,
grows stronger and clearer. That glib label -
“Chinatown” - was always an oversimplification, of
course; before Meltdown, the area contained at least
a dozen distinct cultures besides Hong Kong and
Malaysian Chinese, from Korean to Cambodian, from
Thai to Timorese — and several varieties of every relig-
ion from Buddhism to Islam. All of that diversity has
vanished now, and the homogeneous amalgam that
finally stabilized would probably seem utterly bizarre
to any individual pre-Meltdown inhabitant of the dis-
trict. To the present-day citizens, of course, the
strange hybrid feels exactly right; that’s the definition
of stability, the whole reason the attractors exist. If I
marched right into Chinatown, not only would I find
myself sharing the local values and beliefs. I’d be per-
fectly happy to stay that way for the rest of my life.

I don’t expect that I’ll march right in, though — any

interzone July 1992 53

more than I expect the Earth to dive straight into the
Sun. It’s been almost four years since Meltdown, and
no attractor has captured me yet.

I ’ve heard dozens of “explanations” for the events
of that day, but I find most of them equally dubi-
ous - rooted as they are in the world views of
particular attractors. One way in which I sometimes
think of it, on January 12th, 2018, the human race
must have crossed some kind of unforeseen threshold
— of global population, perhaps — and suffered a sud-
den, irreversible change of psychic state.

Telepathy is not the right word for it; after all,
nobody found themself drowning in an ocean of
babbling voices; nobody suffered the torment of
empathic overload. The mundane chatter of con-
sciousness stayed locked inside our heads; our quoti-
dian mental privacy remained unbreached. (Or
perhaps, as some have suggested, everyone’s mental
privacy was so thoroughly breached that the sum of
our transient thoughts forms a blanket of featureless
white noise covering the planet, which the brain fil-
ters out effortlessly.)

In any case, for whatever reason, the second-by-
second soap operas of other people’s inner lives
remained, mercifully, as inaccessible as ever... but
our skulls became completely permeable to each
other’s values and beliefs, each other’s deepest con-
victions.

At first, this meant pure chaos. My memories of the
time are confused and nightmarish; I wandered the
city for a day and a night (I think), finding God (or
some equivalent) anew every six seconds — seeing no
visions, hearing no voices, but wrenched from faith
to faith by invisible forces of dream logic. People
moved in a daze, cowed and staggering - while ideas
moved between us like lightning. Revelation followed
contradictory revelation. I wanted it to stop, badly —
I would have prayed for it to stop, if God had stayed
the same long enough to be prayed to. I’ve heard other
tramps compare these early mystical convulsions to
drug rushes, to orgasms, to being picked up and
dumped by ten metre waves, ceaselessly, hour after
hour - but looking back, I find myself reminded most
of a bout of gastroenteritis I once suffered: a long,
feverish night of interminable vomiting and diar-
rhoea. Every muscle, every joint in my body ached,
my skin burned; I felt as if I was dying. And every
time I thought I lacked the strength to expel anything
more from my body, another spasm took hold of me.
By four in the morning, my helplessness seemed posi-
tively transcendental: the peristaltic reflex possessed
me like some harsh - but ultimately benevolent -
deity. At the time, it was the most religious experience
I’d ever been through.

All across the city, competing belief systems fought
for allegiance, mutating and hybridizing along the
way... like those random populations of computer
viruses they used to unleash against each other in
experiments to demonstrate subtle points of evolutio-
nary theory. Or perhaps like the historical clashes of
the very same beliefs - with the length and time scales
drastically shortened by the new mode of interaction
- and a lot less bloodshed, now that the ideas them-
selves could do battle in a purely mental arena, rather
than employing sword-wielding Grusaders or exter-

54 in(«rKon<‘ July 1992

mination camps. Or, like a swarm of demons set loose
upon the Earth to possess all but the righteous . . .

The chaos didn’t last long. In some places seeded
by pre-Meltdown clustering of cultures and religions
— and in other places, by pure chance — certain belief
systems gained enough of an edge, enough of a foot-
hold, to start spreading out from a core of believers
into the surrounding random detritus, capturing adja-
cent, disordered populations where no dominant
belief had yet emerged. The more territory these
snowballing attractors conquered, the faster they
grew. Fortunately — in this city, at least — no single
attractor was able to expand unchecked; they all
ended up hemmed in, sooner or later, by equally pow-
erful neighbours — or confined by sheer lack of popu-
lation at the city’s outskirts, and near voids of non-
residential land.

Within a week of Meltdown, the anarchy had crys-
tallized into more-or-less the present configuration,
with ninety-nine percent of the population having
moved - sr changed - until they were content to be
exactly where — and who — they were.

I happened to end up between attractors - affected
by many, but captured by none — and I’ve managed
to stay in orbit ever since. Whatever the knack is, I
seem to have it; over the years, the ranks of the tramps
have thinned, but a core of us remain free.

In the early years, the people of the attractors used
to send up robot helicopters to scatter pamphlets over
the city, putting the case for their respective meta-
phors for what had happened — as if a well-chosen
analogy for the disaster might be enough to win them
converts; it took a while for some of them to under-
stand that the written word had been rendered obso-
lete as a vector for indoctrination. Ditto for
audiovisual techniques — and that still hasn’t sunk in
everywhere. Not long ago, on a battery-powered TV
set in an abandoned house, Maria and I picked up a
broadcast from a network of rationalist enclaves,
showing an alleged “simulation” of Meltdown as a
colour-coded dance of mutually carnivorous pixels,
obeying a few simple mathematical rules. The com-
mentator spouted jargon about self-organizing sys-
tems - and lo, with the magic of hindsight, the flickers
of colour rapidly evolved into the familiar pattern of
hexagonal cells, isolated by moats of darkness (un-
populated except for the barely visible presence of a
few unimportant specks; we wondered which ones
were meant to be us).

I don’t know how things would have turned out if
there hadn’t been the pre-existing infrastructure of
robots and telecommunications to allow people to
live and work without travelling outside their own
basins — the regions guaranteed to lead back to the
central attractor — most of which are only a kilometre
or two wide. (In fact, there must be many places where
that infrastructure wasn’t present, but I haven’t been
exactly plugged into the global village these last few
years, so I don’t know how they’ve fared.) Living on
the margins of this society makes me even more
dependent on its wealth than those who inhabit its
multiple centres, so I suppose I should be glad that
most people are content with the status quo - and I’m
certainly delighted that they can co-exist in peace,
that they can trade and prosper.

Td rather die than join them, that’s all.

■ i (Or at least, that’s true right here, right now.)

T he trick is to keep moving, to maintain momen-
tum. There are no regions of perfect neutrality
- or if there are, they’re too small to find, prob-
ably too small to inhabit, and they’d almost certainly
I? drift as the conditions within fhe hasins varied. Near
U enough is fine for a night, but if I tried to live in one

j place, day after day, week after week, then whichever

! attractor held even the slightest advantage would,

i eventually, begin to sway me.

I Momentum, and confusion. Whether or not it’s true

h that we’re spared each other’s inner voices because
! so much uncorrelated babbling simply cancels itself
out, my aim is to do just that with the more enduring,
more coherent, more pernicious parts of the signal.
At the very centre of the Earth, no doubt, the sum of
all human beliefs adds up to pure, harmless noise;
here on the surface, though, where it’s physically
impossible to be equidistant from everyone, I’m
forced to keep moving to average out the effects as
best I can.

Sometimes I daydream about heading out into the
countryside, and living in glorious clear-headed sol-
itude beside a robot-tended farm, stealing the equip-
ment and supplies I need to grow all my own food.
With Maria? If she’ll come; sometimes she says yes,
]' sometimes she says no. Half a dozen times, we’ve told

f ourselves that we’re setting out on such a journey. . .

I but we’ve yet to discover a trajectory out of the city,

I a route that would take us safely past all the interven-

f ing attractors, without being gradually deflected back

: towards the urban centre. There must be a way out,

I it’s simply a matter of finding it - and if all the

rumours from other tramps have turned out to be dead
ends, that’s hardly surprising: the only people who
t could know for certain how to leave the city are those

> who’ve stumbled on the right path and actually

if departed, leaving no hints or rumours behind.

'S; _ Sometimes, though, I stop dead in the middle of

i the road, and ask myself what I “really want”:

I* To escape to the country, and lose myself in the

I silence of my own mute soul?

To give up this pointless wandering and rejoin
i civilization? For the sake of prosperity, stability, cer-
tainty: to swallow, and be swallowed by, one elabo-
I rate set of self-affirming lies?

I Or, to keep orbiting this way until I die?

,1 The answer, of course, depends on where I’m stand-

J

I M" ore robot trucks pass me, but I no longer

( |%/l give them a second glance. I picture my
iA. ▼ JL hunger as an object — another weight to
carry, not much heavier than my pack — and it gradu-
ally recedes from my attention. I let my mind grow
blank, and I think of nothing but the early morning
' sunshine on my face, and the pleasure of walking.

After a while, a startling clarity begins to wash over
j me; a deep tranquillity, together with a powerful
I sense of undersfanding. The odd part is, I have no
idea what it is that I think I understand ; I’m experienc-
ing the pleasure of insight without any apparent
I cause, without the faintest hope of replying to the
;i question: insight into what? The feeling persists,

f regardless.

interzone July 1992 55

Illustrations by Iain Byers

I think: I’ve travelled in circles, all these years, and
where has it brought me?

To this moment. To this chance to take my first real
steps along the path to enlightenment.

And all I have to do is keep walking, straight ahead.

For four years, I’ve been following a false tao — pur-
suing an illusion of freedom, striving for no reason
but the sake of striving — but now I see the way to
transform that journey into —

Into what? A short-cut to damnation?

“Damnation”? There’s no such thing. Only sam-
sara, the treadmill of desires. Only the futility of striv-
ing. My understanding is clouded, now - but I know
that if I travelled a few steps further, the truth would
soon become clear to me.

For several seconds. I’m paralyzed by indecision —
shot through with pure dread - but then, drawn by
the possibility of redemption, I leave the freeway,
clamber over the fence, and head due south.

These side streets are familiar. I pass a car yard full
of sun-bleached wrecks melting in slow motion, their
plastic chassis triggered by disuse into autodegrada-
tion; a video porn and sex-aids shop, facade intact,
dark within, stinking of rotting carpet and mouse shit;
an outboard motor showroom, the latest - four-year-
old - fuel cell models proudly on display already
looking like bizarre relics from another century.

Then the sight of the cathedral spire rising above
all this squalor hits me with a giddy mixture of nostal-
gia and deja vu. In spite of everything, part of me still
feels like a true Prodigal Son, coming home for the
first time - not passing through for the fiftieth. I mum-
ble prayers and phrases of dogma, strangely comfort-
ing formulae reawakened from memories of my last
perihelion.

Soon, only one thing puzzles me: how could I have
known God’s perfect love - and then walked away?
It’s unthinkable. How could I have turned my back
on Him?

I come to a row of pristine houses; I know they’re
uninhabited, but here in the border zone the diocesan
robots keep the lawns trimmed, the leaves swept, the
walls painted. A few blocks further, south-west, and
I’ll never turn my back on the truth again. I head that
way, gladly.

Almost gladly.

The only trouble is . . . with each step south it grows
harder to ignore the fact that the scriptures - let alone
Catholic dogma — are full of the most grotesque errors
of fact and logic. Why should a revelation from a per-
fect, loving God be such a dog’s breakfast of threats
and contradictions? Why should it offer such a flawed
and confused view of humanity’s place in the uni-
verse?

Errors of fact? The metaphors had to be chosen to
suit the world view of the day; should God haye mys-
tified the author of Genesis with details of the Big
Bang, and primordial nucleosynthesis? Contradic-
tions? Tests of faith — and humility. How can I be so
arrogant as to set my wretched powers of reasoning
against the Word of the Almighty? God transcends
everything, logic included.

Logic especially.

It’s no good. Virgin births? Miracles with loaves
and fishes? Resurrection? Poetic fables only, not to
be taken literally? If that’s the case, though, what’s

left but a few well-intentioned homilies, and a lot of
pompous theatrics? If God did in fact become man,
suffer, die, and rise again to save me, then I owe Him
everything ... but if it’s just a beautiful story, then I
can love my neighbour with or without regular doses
of bread and wine.

I veer south-east.

The truth about the universe (here) is infinitely
stranger, and infinitely more grand: it lies in the Laws
of Physics that have come to Know Themselves
through humanity. Our destiny and purpose are
encoded in the fine structure constant, and the value
of the density omega. The human race — in whatever
form, robot or organic - will keep on advancing for
the next ten billion years, until we can give rise to
the hyperintelligence which will cause the finely
tuned Big Bang required to bring us into existence.

If we don’t die out in the next few millennia.

In which case, other intelligent creatures will per-
form the task. It doesn’t matter who carries the torch.

Exactly. None of it matters. Why should I care what
a civilization of post-humans, robots, or aliens, might
or might not do ten billion years from now? What
does any of this grandiose shit have to do with me?

1 finally catch sight of Maria, a few blocks ahead
of me — and right on cue, the existentialist attrac-
tor to the west firmly steers me away from the
suburbs of cosmic baroque. I increase my pace, but
only slightly — it’s too hot to run, but more to the
point, sudden acceleration can have some peculiar
side-effects, bringing on unexpected philosophical
swerves.

As I narrow the gap, she turns at the sound of my
footsteps.

I say, “Hi.”

“Hi.” She doesn’t seem exactly thrilled to see me —
but then, this isn’t exactly the place for it.

I fall into step beside her. “You left without me.”
She shrugs. “I wanted to be on my own for a while.
I wanted to think things over.”

I laugh. “If you wanted to think, you should have
stayed on the freeway.”

“There’s another spot ahead. In the park. It’s just
as good.”

She’s right - although now I’m here to spoil it for
her. I ask myself for the thousandth time: Why do I
want us to stay together? Because of what we have in
common? But we owe most of that to the very fact
that we are together — travelling the same paths, cor-
rupting each other with our proximity. Because of our
differences, then? For the sake of occasional moments
of mutual incomprehensibility? But the longer we’re
together, the more that vestige of mystery will be
eroded; orbiting each other can only lead to a spiral-
ling together, an end to all distinctions.

Why, then?

The honest answer (here and now) is: food and sex
— although tomorrow, elsewhere, no doubt I’ll look
back and brand that conclusion a cynical lie.

I fall silent as we drift towards the equilibrium zone.
The last few minutes’ confusion still rings in my head,
satisfyingly jumbled, the giddy succession of trun-
cated epiphanies effectively cancelling eac;h other
out, leaving nothing behind but an amorphous sense
of distrust. I remember a school of thought from pro-

56 July 1992

Meltdown days which proclaimed, withhovine good
intentions — confusing laudable tolerance with sheer
credulity ^ that there was something of value in every
human philosophy ... and what’s more, when you got
right down to it, they all really spoke the same “uni-
versal truths,” and were all. ultimately, reconcilable.
Apparently, none of these supine ecumenicists have
survived to witness the palpable disproof of their
hypothesis; I expect they all converted, three seconds
after Meltdown, to the faith of whoever was standing
closest to them at the time.

Maria mutters angrily, “Wonderful!” I look up at
her, then follow her gaze. The park has come into
view, and if it’s time to herself she wanted, she has
more than me to contend with. At least two dozen
other tramps are gathered in the shade. That’s rare,
but it does happen; equilibrium zones are the slowest
parts of everybody’s orbits, so I suppose it’s not sur-
prising that occasionally a group of us end up
becalmed together.

As we come closer, I notice something stranger:
everybody reclining on the grass is facing the same
way. Watching something - or someone — hidden
from view by the trees.

Someone. A woman’s voice reaches us, the words
indistinct at this distance, but the tone mellifluous.
Confident. Gentle but persuasive.

Maria says nervously, “Maybe we should stay back.
Maybe the equilibrium’s shifted.”

“Maybe.” I’m as worried as she is - but intrigued
as well. I don’t feel much of a tug from any of the
familiar local attractors - but then, I can’t be sure that
my curiosity itself isn’t a new hook for an old idea.

I say, “Let's just . . . skirt around the rim of the park.
We can’t ignore this; we have to find out what’s going
on.” If a nearby basin has expanded and captured the
park, then keeping our distance from the speaker is
no guarantee of freedom; it’s not her words, or her
lone presence, that could harm us — but Maria (know-
ing all this. I’m sure) accepts my “strategy” for ward-
ing off the danger, and nods assent.

W e position ourselves in the middle of the
road at the eastern edge of the park, without
noticeable effect. The speaker, middle-aged
I’d guess, looks every inch a tramp, from the dirt-stiff
clothes to the crudely-cut hair to the weathered skin
and lean build of a half-starved perennial walker.
Only the voice is wrong. She’s set up a frame, like an
easel, on which she’s stretched a large map of the city;
the roughly hexagonal cells of the basins are neatly
rharked in a variety of colours. People used to swap
maps like this all the time, in the early years; maybe
she’s just showing off her prize possession, hoping to
trade it for something worthwhile. 1 don't think much
of her chances; by now. I’m sure, every tramp relies
on his or her own mental picture of the ideological
terrain.

Then she lifts a pointer and traces part of a feature
I’d missed: a delicate web of blue lines, weaving
through the gaps between the hexagons.

The woman says, “But of course it’s no accident.
We haven’t stayed out of the basins all these years by
sheer good luck - or even skill.” She looks out across
the crowd, notices us, pauses a moment, then says
calmly, “We’ve been captured by our oivn attractor.

iiitorKoiii- July 1992 57

It’s nothing like the others - it’s not a fixed set of
beliefs, in a fixed location - but it’s still an attractor,
it’s still drawn us to it from whatever unstable orbits
we might have been on. I’ve mapped it — or part of it
- and I’ve sketched it as well as I can. The true detail
may be infinitely fine - but even from this crude rep-
resentation, you should recognize paths that you’ve
walked yourselves.”

I stare at the map. From this distance, the blue
strands are impossible to follow individually; I can
see that they cover the route that Maria and I have
taken, over the last few days, but -

An old man calls out, “You’ve scrawled a lot of
lines between the basins. What does that prove?”

“Not between all the basins.” She touches a point
on the map. “Has anyone ever been here? Or here? Or
here? No? Here? Or here? Why not? They’re all wide
corridors between attractors — they look as safe as any
of the others. So why have we never been to these
places? For the same reason nobody living in the fixed
attractors has: they’re not part of our territory; they’re
not part of our own attractor.”

I know she’s talking nonsense, but the phrase alone
is enough to make me feel panicky, claustrophobic.
Our own attractor. We’ve been captured by our own
attractor. I scan the rim of the city on the map; the
blue line never comes close to it. In fact, the line gets
about as far from the centre as I’ve ever travelled,
myself. . .

Proving what? Only that this woman has had no
better luck than I have. If she’d escaped the city, she
wouldn’t be here to claim that escape was impossible.

A woman in the crowd - visibly pregnant - says,
“You’ve drawn your own paths, that’s all. You’ve
stayed out of danger - I’ve stayed out of danger - we
all know what places to avoid. That’s all you’re telling
us. That’s all we have in common.”

“No!” The speaker traces a stretch of the blue line
again. “This is who we are. We’re not aimless wander-
ers; we’re the people of this strange attractor. We have
an identity - a unity - after all.”

There’s laughter, and a few desultory insults from
the crowd. I whisper to Maria, “Do you know her?
Have you seen her before?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

“You wouldn’t have. Isn’t it obvious? She’s some
kind of robot evangelist — ”

“She doesn’t talk much like one.”

“Rationalist - not Christian or Mormon.”

“Rationalists don’t send evangelists.”

“No? Mapping strange attractors; if that’s not
rationalist jargon, what is it?”

Maria shrugs. “Basins, attractors - they’re all
rationalist words, but everybody uses them. You
know what they say: the Devil has the best tunes, but
the rationalists have the best jargon. Words have to
come from somewhere.”

The woman says, “I’ll build my church on sand.
And I’ll ask no one to follow me - and yet, you will.
You all will.”

I say, “Let’s go.” I take Maria’s arm, but she pulls
free angrily.

“Why are you so against her? Maybe she’s right.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Everyone else has an attractor — why can’t we have
one of our own? Stranger than all the rest. Look at it:

it’s the most beautiful thing on the map.”

I shake my head, horrified. “How can you say that?
We’ve stayed free. We’ve struggled so hard to stay
free.”

She shrugs. “Maybe. Or maybe we’ve been captured
by what you call freedom. Maybe we don’t need to
struggle any more. Is that so bad? If we’re doing what
we want, either way, why should we care?”

W ithout any fuss, the woman starts packing
up her easel, and the crowd of tramps
begins to disperse. Nobody seems to have
been much affected by the brief sermon; everyone
heads off calmly on their own chosen orbits.

I say, “The people in the basins are doing what they
want. I don’t want to be like them.”

Maria laughs. “Believe me, you’re not.”

“No, you’re right. I’m not: they’re rich, fat and com-
placent; I’m starving, tired, and confused. And for
what? Why am I living this way? That robot’s trying
to take a^^ay the one thing that makes it all worth-
while.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m tired and hungry, too. And maybe
an attractor of my own will make it all worthwhile.”

“How?” I laugh derisively. “Will you worship it?
Will you pray to it?”

“No. But I won’t have to be afraid anymore. If we
really have been captured - if the way we live is stable,
after all - then putting one foot wrong won’t matter:
we’ll be drawn back to our own attractor. We won’t
have to worry that the smallest mistake will send us
sliding into one of the basins. If that’s true, aren’t you
glad?”

I shake my head angrily. “That’s bullshit - danger-
ous bullshit. Staying out of the basins is a skill, it’s a
gift. You know that. We navigate the channels, care-
fully, balancing the opposing forces

“Do we? I’m sick of feeling like a tight-rope walker. ”
“Being sick of it doesn’t mean it isn’t true! Don’t
you see? She wants us to be complacent! The more
of us who start to think orbiting is easy, the more of
us will end up captured by the basins

I’m distracted by the sight of the prophet hefting
her possessions and setting off.’ I say, “Look at her:
she may be a perfect imitation - but she’s a robot,
she’s a fake. They’ve finally understood that their
pamphlets and their preaching machines won’t work,
so they’ve sent a machine to lie to us about our free-
dom.”

Maria says, “Prove it.”

“What?”

“You’ve got a knife. If she’s a robot, go after her,
stop her, cut her open. Prove it.”

The woman, the robot, crosses the park, heading
north-west, away from us. I say, “You know me; I
could never do that.”

“If she’s a robot, she won’t feel a thing.”

“But she looks human. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t
stick a knife into a perfect imitation of human flesh. ”
“Because you know she’s not a robot. You know
she’s telling the truth.”

Part of me is simply glad to be arguing with Maria,
for the sake of proving our separateness — but part of
me finds everything she’s saying too painful to leave
unchallenged.

I hesitate a moment, then I put down my pack and

58 interzone July 1992

sprint across the park towards the prophet.

She turns when she hears me, and stops walking.
There’s no one else nearby. I halt a few metres away
from her, and catch my breath. She regards me with
patient curiosity. I stare at her, feeling increasingly
foolish. I can’t pull a knife on her: she might not be
a robot, after all - she might just be a tramp with
strange ideas. •

She says, “Did you want to ask me something?”

Almost without thinking, 1 blurt out, “How do you
know nobody’s ever left the city? How can you be so
sure it’s never happened?”

She shakes her head. “1 didn’t say that. The attractor
looks like a closed loop to me. Anyone who’s been
captured by it could never leave. IBut other people
may have escaped.”

“What other people?”

“People who weren’t in the attractor’s basin.”

I scowl, confused. “What basin? I’m not talking
about the people of the basins, Tm talking about us. ”

She laughs. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean the basins that
lead to the fixed attractors. Our strange attractor has
a basin, too: all the points that lead to it. I don’t know
what this basin’s shape is: like the attractor itself, the
detail could be infinitely fine. Not every point in the
gaps between the hexagons would be part of it: some
points must lead to the fixed attractors - that’s why
some tramps have been captured by them. Other
points would belong to the strange attractor’s basin.
But others — ”

“What?”

“Other points might lead to infinity. To escape.”

“Which points?”

She shrugs. “Who knows? There could be two
points, side by side, one leading into the strange
attractor, one leading - eventually — out of the city.
The only way to find out which is which would be
to start at each point, and see what happens.”

“But you said we’d all been captured, already

She nods. “After so many orbits, the basins must
have emptied into their respective attractors. The
attractors are the stable part: the basins lead into the
attractors, but the attractors lead into themselves.
Anyone who was destined for a fixed attractor must
be in it by now - and anyone who was destined to
leave the city has already gone. Those of us who are
still in orbit will stay that way. We have to understand
that, accept that, learn to live with it . . . and if that
means inventing our own faith, our own religion

I grab her arm, draw my knife, and quickly scrape
the point across her forearm. She yelps and pulls free,
then clasps her hand to the wound. A moment later,
she takes it away to inspect the damage, and I see the
thin red line on her arm, and a rough wet copy on her
palm.

“You lunatic!” she yells, backing away.

Maria approaches us. The probably-flesh-and-
blood prophet addresses her: “He’s mad! Get him off
me!” Maria takes hold of my arm, then, inexplicably,
leans towards me and puts her tongue in my ear. 1
burst out laughing. The woman steps back uncer-
tainly, then turns and hurries away.

Maria says, “Not much of a dissection - but as far
as it went, it was in my favour. I win.”

I hesitate, then feign surrender.

“You win.”

B y nightfall, we end up on the freeway again;
this time, to the east of the city centre. We gaze
at the sky above the black silhouettes of aban-
doned office towers, our brains mildly scrambled by
the residual effects of a nearby cluster of astrologers,
as we eat the day’s prize catch: a giant vegetarian
pizza.

Finally, Maria says, “Venus has set. I think I ought
to sleep now.”

I nod. “I’ll wait up for Mars.”

Traces of the day’s barrage drift through my mind,
more or less at random - but I can still recall most of
what the woman in the park told me.

After so many orbits, the basins must have emp-
tied...

So by now, we’ve all ended up captured . But - how
could she know that? How could she be sure?

And what if she’s wrong? What if we haven’t all,
yet, arrived in our final resting place?

The astrologers say: None of her filthy, materialist,
reductioni«t lies can be true. Except the ones about
destiny. We like destiny. Destiny is fine.

I get up and walk a dozen metres south, neutralizing
their contribution. Then I turn and watch Maria sleep-
ing.

There could be two points, side by side, one leading
into the strange attractor, one leading - eventually -
out of the city. The only way to find out which is
which would be to start at each point, and see what
happens.

Right now, everything she said sounds to me like
some heavily distorted and badly misunderstood
rationalist model. And here I am, grasping at hope by
seizing on half of her version, and throwing out the
rest. Metaphors mutating and hybridizing, all over
again . . .

I walk over to Maria, crouch down and bend to kiss
her, gently, upside-down on the forehead. She doesn’t
even stir.

Then I lift my pack and set off down the freeway,
believing for a moment that I can feel the emptiness
beyond the city reach through, reach over, all the obs-
tacles ahead, and claim me.

Greg Egan not only gained first place in tnterzone’s 1991
popularity poll, with “The Infinite Assassin” (issue 48),
but, for the second year running, he has two stories in Gard-
ner Dozois’s anthology The Year’s Best Science Fiction -
they are “Blood Sisters” (from IZ 44) and “The Moat” (from
the Australian small-press magazine Aurealis). His first
novel. Quarantine, is due out soon from Century/Legend.
He lives in Perth, Australia.

Back issues of Interzohe
- all available except numbers
1, 5, 7, 22 and 23. See page 3
for ordering details.

interzone July 1992 59

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So do keep a lookout for the August Interzone, on sale in July.

60 interzone July 1992

BOOK REVIEWS

Makers’ Dice

W e must enter dragon country, the
valley of the shadow of the
world of the makers, After Silence by
Jonathan Carroll (Macdonald, £14.99),
badlands. If we are sufficiently
enamoured by the game of art to read
the book with care, and there is little
point in reading Jonathan Carroll just
for the fun he seems to promise, we
will not shut the last page unscathed
into the silence it leaves. Like all of
Carroll’s tales to date in the untitled
quintet which comprises his central
accomplishment (reviews of early vol-
umes have appeared in Interzones 23,
30, 32 and 51), After Silence is a moral
fable partly about the cost of being a
maker, but far more hurtingly it is
about the fee makers charge the world
for submitting to the obscene intimacy
of the act of art. It is about pain, and it
gives pain.

Like the protagonists of all the previ-
ous instalments of the quintet— the ear-
lier volumes are Bones of the Moon
(1987), Sleeping in Flame (1988), A
Child Across the Sky (1989) and Out-
side the Dog Museum (1991); and in
the absence of an overall designation
for all five I think, for the purposes of
a short review, I’ll give them a name:
the Answered Prayers Quintet,
perhaps - the figure who narrates After
Silence is a shaper. Max Fischer has
been drawing cartoons from early
childhood, and like most Carroll pro-
tagonists has seemed to achieve suc-
cess without having to undergo any
undue stress, as though the great world
outside his childhood were no more
than an extension of his family, no
more than a continued tabula rasa
upon which he has invisibly earned an
entitlement to make his mark. By the
end of the novel, his “Paper Clip,” a
daily comic strip, is being syndicated
to more than 300 newspapers, and he
is a celebrity. But Fischer hardly seems
to notice what must amount by his
early 40s to a very considerable for-
tune, as though he does not need the
immunity wealth brings. For Fischer,
it is not that the world owes him a liv-
ing; it’s more that the world is indistin-
guishable from his living.

(It might be noted that Carroll him-
self sometimes seems not to notice the
drag coefficient of the world, either, so
that when a crisis occurs he has not
adequately stocked his protagonist
with arms and devices to deal with the
obtuseness of things. When that pro-
tagonist is a rich man like Fischer - a
man any normal book would invest
with the world-transforming obstacle-
dissolving glamour of wealth - this
absence becomes very noticeable. At
the climax of the tale, Fischer therefore
finds the job of tracing his son’s flight
- by scheduled airline, just a few hours
earlier, across America from California
to New Jersey - just as difficult as any
of us would. But no rich man who has
used detective agencies for decades

could fail instinctively to instruct one
of thenj. to arrange to have his son
tracked from the New Jersey airport
he’s not yet even landed at, on that
already identified flight; and further-
more to arrange for his son’s targets
somehow to he protected from the fam-
ily-romance blow-out the lad has just
experienced.)

W hatever. By the time the novel
begins, Fischer has been riding
this dream-life for years, a life he has
managed to keep under wraps. Like
other Carroll protagonists, in other
words, he is a sleepwalker who owns
the pavement. Or so it seems. Then he
meets Lily Aaron and her son Lincoln
at a show where one of his own car-
toons has been hung. As a gesture to
the woman, whose complex tangy alert
presence he finds immediately cap-
tivating, and to the child, who seems
to share her exuberant clarity of being,
he draws a cartoon on Lincoln’s
teeshirt with a black marking pen:
already (in other words) he has begun
to transform the child into a palimp-
sest, a vector of his gift.

Lily turns out to be the manager of
a restaurant named Crowds and Power.
This is a typical power-twee Los
Angeles name, of course; but it is also
the title of Elias Canetti’s famous 1960
study of the metaphysics of control,
and any proper study of Carroll (who
will, in due course, like every writer
of stature, be murdered by the dissect-
ing eye of critic beholders, regardless
of the cunning reticences of his public
life, the quip hints of interstices
beyond our grasp: so be warned, Mr
Carroll: you’re next) must necessarily
dice his oeuvre through this great and
metaphor-choked arraignment of the
men of the century. This is Canetti,
almost at random: “It is difficult to
resist the suspicion that behind
paranoia, as behind all power, lies the
same profound urge: the desire to get
other men out of the way so as to be
the only one.” Also: “People save ‘for
the sake of the children’ and allow
others to starve. What they are really
doing is keeping everything for them-
selves.” Ecce Fischer.

His first impulse, on meeting a
woman with whom he has become
enamoured, is to hire a detective
agency to check up on her, to serve as
poison taster for the king. The “family”
is soon established, and he soon begins
to describe their lives together in a

John elute

porcelain-glaze prose which gives
some of the scenes depicted something
of the frightening burnish of a frieze.
It is also the case, however, that the
life so limned is in fact a life which
seems to bristle with rightness (right-
ness of touch, perhaps) and energy. If
After Silence is in some ways stronger
than any previous Carroll novel, and
if it seems the most inherently poig-
nant representation of the curse atten-
dant upon Answered Prayers, it is
because the family here depicted does
express like mother’s milk a genuine
human glamour, because Lily Aaron is
an astonishingly attractive person,
because Lincoln is a beautiful and nor-
mal child (even though we soon begin
to fear that he has been normalized by
the power of the maker). So it is a shock
when it all begins to be killed.

We do not know for certain what
kind of death will soon be presented
for us to remember in our dreams of
reading; but we know that some life
must snap, we know that Fischer will
not be able to fend off any violation
from outside of the life story he’s tel-
ling himself. Beset as he is by interpre-
tive frenzies which now and then take
him to one of his detective agencies,
Fischer needs only a seed, a hangnail,
an incipit, to become a monster, a mod-
ernized version of the protagonist of
Henry James’s The Sacred Fount
(1901), the century’s first and still its
most extreme apotheosis of the terrible
power of art to shape movements and
shadows and absences and glints into
golem apes of humans acting. James’s
protagonist, who also argues bis case
to the ideal reader in a voice of the
intensest plausibility, is Fischer with
gloves on. “I found, on my side,” he
says of the woman around whom he
has constructed a cloying artifice of
“observation,” “a rare intellectual joy,
the oddest secret exultation, in feeling
her begin instantly to play the part I
had attributed to her in the irreducible
drama.” In the end (as for Fischer) it
turns to silence.

T he silence begins with Lily’s odd
behaviour after Lincoln has been
knocked out by a baseball and taken to
the local hospital for treatment; her
paranoia about giving the hospital any
factual information triggers one of
Fischer’s bouts of interpretation, and
he hires a detective to ransack her life,
just as he has almost immediately ran-
sacked her apartment in search of

iiil€>rzon<> July 1992 61

clues. What he discovers is that Lily’s
entire past seems to have been fabri-
cated (an act of lese majeste, indeed
one that hints of regicide, in Fischer’s
Crowds-and-Power world), and that a
bleak mystery seems to surround her
child. The mystery is soon “solved” by
Fischer. Years before (it seems), Lily
had kidnapped the infant child from a
New Jersey family named Meier. What
should be done? (Do we believe
Fischer’s decipherment of the clues?)
Any life between Fischer and Lily from
now on, whether or not they share in
each other’s knowledge, will be an
artefact, a porcelain glaze of family
romance against the abyss. And so it
proves. Lily eventually begins a con-
fession, which Fischer continues for
her, and they agree to believe what the
two of them (or rather Fischer) have
together agreed (but the plot is by no
means unwound) will henceforth be
the truth of the matter. In order to seal
their lives into shape, they bury this
agreed past, they relegate the grieving
parents in New Jersey to aeons of
further grief. They marry. Years pass.

But there is one additional gloss,
which brings the novel into knives ’-
reach of the supernatural, and justifies
this review in Interzone (beyond the
fact that we would be fools not to
notice Carroll because he “failed” to
obey a genre precept). Fischer has been
praying for a life capable of bearing the
charges he levies, and at the moment
of crisis he finds an answer to this
prayer. He “realizes” that he and Lin-
coln are the same person, that they are
the same soul in different bodies. This
“realization,” the sort of cheap and
obscene plot uplift we can all find in
the typical contemporary fantasy, both
serves as the final sealant in Fischer’s
construction of a life of art (which is a
golem life), and as the final straw
which breaks Lincoln, when the plot
begins to cut the tale into shreds, when
the sacred fount dries, when super-
natural events occur (or do not) but
save nothing, and there is silence.

And the review ends. I do not wish
at this point to try to grasp entire the
Answered Prayers Quintet, which may
in any case, given the fact Carroll has
never been clear about its compass, not
have begun to end; it is not yet time,
in other words, to lay soiled golem cri-
tic hands upon the whole work. Let
one merely say that Carroll’s failings
are as evident here as elsewhere, and
as unimportant to the whole. There is
the surface of telling which sometimes
alienates through an excess of device;
the air of insistent ease that protests
too much, that forces one at times to
think there can be no such thing as a
reliable narrator in any Carroll tale; the
already notorious difficulty with end-
ings (but here exploited with real suc-
cess). So what. In the end, Carroll
speaks to us about what we are, in lan-
guage clearer and more dangerous than

62 interzone July 1992

we sometimes dare to admit, language
that strips bare the mithridatic toler-
ance we establish, as readers, for the
deaths art deals. In After Silence, a
numen glows. Out of the dark terato-
genous fount of art comes, at times, in
books like this, the cutting flame we
long for, when we read for the sake of
our lives.

A fter silence, a sound of knitting.

.Charles Sheffield’s Cold as Ice
(Tor Books, $19.95) is a hard-sf novel
set on Earth and throughout the solar
system in 2092 AD (but by now we
should really be saying 2092 Common
Era, which shortens to CE) and it is full
of the sound of the worlds outside the
self. It is a bright, gainfully employed,
excellently constructed, exterior tale
of system-wide politics, scientific
breakthrough, plot and counterplot.
There is a 20-year-old mystery, dating
from the end of the intra-systffm war
which decimated Earth’s population
and savaged the asteroids and the
Jovian hegemonies. This mystery
relates to a genetic engineering conspi-
racy which may have given birth to a
bunch of homo superiors, a possibility
Sheffield allows us to confirm way
before any character in the book has
much of a clue, so that a genuine sense
of wonder (see this reviewer’s com-
ments in Interzone 50 to the effect that
the sense of wonder in sf is in fact a
form of dramatic irony) permeates the
telling. All comes right in the end, and
the book knits smartly to a stop: pure
chain-mail.

But Sheffield isnotjustaprettyface.
The world he gives us, here and in
many of his earlier books, may be
debugged of the running-dog subjec-
tivisms of a Jonathan Carroll, and may
seem terribly empty of souls in con-
sequence; but it seems utterly clear
that this is a deliberate stripping of the
decks, and that Sheffield knows very
well indeed just what sort of tale it is
he’s writing. Cold as Ice is a world
fable, and a joy to read. The pro-
tagonists it contains — there are a lot of
them, all neatly mission-controlled,
packaged, labelled, pre-paid, cost-
effective - have been given strict
instructions to serve the world of the
book, and do so. They have no brief to
mesmerize that world with the mega-
phone diktats of the human soul at full
blare, and do not. As readers, therefore,
we have nothing between us and the
dream of the fable but the way it is told,
and Cold as Ice is almost invisible in
the telling, like a window. Unlike
almost every hard-sf writer now alive
(for Asimov is dead) and working,
Sheffield writes in clear. There is no
poison in the pen. The world thrives.

Note. I had thought it might be rompish
good fun to delve into the Star Wars
sharecrop, see if that nice Timothy
Zahn enjoyed picking cotton, and

began to look at Star Wars #1: Heir to
the Empire (1991) and Star Wars #2:
Dark Force Rising (Bantam Books,
$18.50), first printing 250,000 hard-
backs, moolah galore you kinda guess.
But there was no fun going, no risk, no
fling. The book was dinky, oafish, dim-
ply, numb, diseased and cheap. It was
not a tale which is told. It was a tale
which relieves itself.

So I decided not to eat any more.

(John elute J

A Commerce of
Ideas

Paul J. McAuley

L et’s get this straight from the start.

I Murasaki (Bantam Spectra, $20) is
not, as its publisher claims on the dust
jacket, a novel in six parts. Murasaki
is not a novel at all. Instead, as Robert
Silverberg, who co-edited it with the
ubiquitous Martin H. Greenberg,
points out in his introduction, it is a
shared-world anthology. It is a collec-
tion of six hard sf short stories about
twin alien worlds and their inhabit-
ants, which each pick up the narrative
ball and run with it as their authors see
fit, within parameters set by Poul
Anderson (who designed the worlds
and their biology), Frederik Pohl (who
designed the future history and the
sociology of the human and alien
societies) and Silverberg himself, who
sketched, as he puts it, the fundamen-
tal narrative structure.

Now shared-world narratives aren’t
unique to sf. Any long-running TV
serial or soap opera, from Twin Peaks
to Dynasty, is precisely that; and
ghosted or semi-ghosted sequels to
successful novels or series of novels
are shared-world narratives too.
What’s interesting about the best sf and
fantasy shared-world anthologies is
that within defined parameters the
contributors can take the key ideas and
turn them into something unexpected,
and are able to advance the plot not in
a straight line, but with the jive and
jostle of a basketball team hustling the
ball towards the hoop. For the writers
are not moving within a landscape of
characters and their conflicts, as in
soap opera, but in the purer realm of
idea, and ideas are not important in
themselves (when they are merely
notions) , but for what is made of them.

So: Murasaki is very definitely a
commercial construction, aimed at
those stone sf junkies who’ll appreci-
ate — and understand - its trope satura-
tion. In its construction, Silverberg
deliberately invokes the ghost of Har-
lan Ellison’s successful Medea anthol-
ogy (another exploration of an alien
world and its inhabitants by diverse
hands, in which Silverberg was

involved), and also restricts his crew
to winners of the Nebula Award. But
does it work as a narrative structure?

T he scenario is that classic sf pre-
mise - contact with aliens and the
need to comprehend the way in which
they live in their world, which com-
prehension is a mirror in which our
own way of living is distortingly
reflected. The world — worlds — is a
double planetary system of Genji and
Chujo orbiting a red dwarf star, the
eponymous Murasaki. On Genji, a
species of sapient aliens lives on the
land on one side of the planet, and on
the other, a second species lives on the
shore of a great ocean when juvenile,
and in the ocean when adult (and pos-
sibly non-sentient). On Ghujo, which
is smaller and colder and drier, a
species of nomads perpetually roam,
and there are ruins of a lost civiliza-
tion. It is the interrelationship between
the three types of alien, and the mean-
ing of the fall of the lost civilization,
that the Japanese and American col-
onists must riddle to understand the
worlds in which they must now make
their home.

Now this is by no means an original
plot (and indeed with its red dwarf star
is one that is particularly familiar to
your reviewer), but most hard sf
advances not by abrupt paradigm
shifts but by modulation of existing
notions. And so here. The stories take
us from the first explorations and a
confused encounter with the aliens of
Chujo, in which a crewman dying from
radiation-induced leukemia is trans-
formed (Frederik Pohl), through the
deepening of the mystery of inter-
relationships of the three species
(David Brin, Poul Anderson and Greg-
ory Benford), to a religious crisis (Greg
Bear) and the final epiphanic resolu-
tion (Nancy Kress). Despite the very
different agendas of the various par-
ticipants (most noticeably Brin’s
ecological concerns, detailed with a
fine urgency), and despite the lack of
a common subtext (which is to say, of
a cohesive system of assumed signs
and values, which as much as the nar-
rative hold together the text of a novel),
so that these stories are at best frag-
ments of a whole, there is a sense of
narrative propulsion, of a mystery
ripening towards resolution. In that,
Murasaki, although it is by no means
as ground-breaking as Silverberg pro-
fesses, transcends its commercial con-
ception.

But it is also something more: a hard
sf thought experiment in the classical
mode with the scaffolding showing, for
the essays in which Anderson and
Pohl describe the worldbuilding are
appended; a detailed outline of the
playground in which Anderson, Bear,
Benford, Brin, Kress and Pohl have col-
oured in their segments in their own
particular styles, according to their

own particular preoccupations.
Because of that, it is a very useful
primer for any fledgling hard sf writer,
and may find its ultimate niche not on
the bestseller lists, but on the reference
lists of sf courses alongside Silver-
berg’s own Worlds of Wonder.

T homas F. Monteleone’s The Blood
of the Lamh (Tor, $22.95) is indis-
putably a novel, a horror novel in fact,
lent it gives off the odour of something
that is not a finished product but is
merely a developmental stage of some-
thing else - the final instar being a Hol-
lywood movie. Its story is simple. A
Catholic priest in New York suddenly
finds that he can perform miracles, the
first of which is the incineration by
lightning of a drug-crazed mugger, is
given publicity by a young ambitious
woman reporter, and becomes the
centre of a New Age Millen^ialist
movement. But is he really a clone
derived from bloodstains left by Jesus
Christ on the Turin Shroud (which
leads to a long tangled explanation
that, gee, of course the Shroud is a fake,
but it was once in contact with the real
thing) or is he the Antichrist who will
usher in the apocalypse?

Well, reader, given that his miracles
mostly consist of loosing blue light-
ning bolts and generating personal
force-fields rather than turning water
into wine or multiplying loaves and
fishes (although he does heal the muti-
lations of his best friend, who has been
graphically tortured) , and given that he
beds the willing reporter with hardly
a qualm, it isn’t that hard to decide.
And given that although this a novel
in which the nature of the Godhead is
crucial to the plot, and which is largely
populated by clerics, there’s virtually
no theological debate, and given that
the thunderbolt-wielding priest is
depicted as being (a) a handsome stud
and (b) as being hot and bothered by
sex as any thirteen year old, I suggest
you skip the book and wait for the
movie. There are a handful of good set-
pieces (in the best of which a kind of
New Age Woodstock is depicted with
a nice irony), but any competent
scriptwriter would copy them whole
into his screenplay. And with Tom
Hanks as the lightning-bolt wielding
priest, Emilio Estevez as his Jesuit
buddy, Rosanna Arquette as the repor-
ter, Robbie Coltrane as the scheming
Cardinal and James Woods as the Vat-
ican Assassin, we can more willingly
suspend our disbelief.

N o, if it’s horror you want, and
you’re into the sex and drugs and
blood and guts and rock’n’roll ethos of
splatterpunk, then David Schow’s The
Shaft (Future, £4.50) is very definitely
your cup of tainted meat. Schow is one
of the best of the new wave of hard-
edge horror writers who utilize the real
everyday horrors of the moronic inferno

of American urban streetlife to charge
up their monster-on-the-loose tales.

Here, the monster is an apartment
building in downtown Chicago, where
something lives at the bottom of the
airshaft, foul gloop erupts from the
plumbing, a cat daintily walks through
walls, leaving bloody footprints, and
tenants vanish one by one and reap-
pear as patchwork revenants to
menace the survivors. Tangled up in
this Boschian Burlesque are a drug
dealer on the run, your standard stun-
ningly beautiful and intelligent whore
with a heart of gold, also on the run,
and an innocent on the rebound from
a failed relationship.

The Shaft is very definitely not sub-
tle - it’s not supposed to be - but it’s
charged up with an electrifying inten-
sity and a gritty realism that, leavened
with cynical, world-weary black
humour, jolts new life into old bones.
This time the movie probably won’t be
better than the book.

N ancy A. Collins’s In The Blood
(New English Library, £4.99) is
Ying to Schow’s Yang. It’s her third
novel, and features the same vampire
heroine as her successful Sunglasses
After Dark. The heroine is Sonya Blue,
who didn’t die in the process of con-
version from human to vampire, and
so is the only person who can thwart
the plans of her vampire “father” to
create a new master race. She’s helped
by Palmer, a private eye who becomes
her catspaw, and who gradually learns
just how attractive the vampire life-
style can be. After all, who wouldn’t
want to live for ever, stay forever
young, gain psychic powers, and not
have to go through the tacky process
of becoming one of the undead first?

Sonya Blue is the book’s strongest
point, a kind of feminist power fantasy
who can act tough but stay glamorous,
handle impossible situations and con-
trol men with her mind — “I could keep
you like this for hours. Days, if I so
choose. Of course, your bladder and
testicles would rupture long before
then. And even if you escaped being
killed by your own sperm and piss . . .
you’ll be impotent for life,” she tells
Palmer, after he gets a little out of line
and she wills an erection on him. Col-
lins has a lot of fun with the cliches of
the vampire novel, too, but in the end,
overloaded with ghosts and psychic
powers and werewolves and Chinese
werewolves who are also inscrutable
herbalists and ogres and pyrotics and
mad scientists and demon babies and
succubi, the whole structure is
stamped flat by whimsy.

For if anything can happen at any
turn of the plot, which in this case it
usually does, then it doesn’t matter
what happens at the end. Although
there’s much that’s fast and sassy and
fun (did I mention the tobacco demons
which sit on the shoulder of every

■ nli‘rzon(> July 1992 63

cigarette junkie?), In the Blood is, as
the most cliched character of all, the
ghost of a Brit rocker, would say (and
I swear I’m not exaggerating), “A right
bleedin’ mess. Coo! ’N no mistake!”

J ames P. Blaylock’s Lord Kelvin’s
Machine (Arkham House, $19.95;
illustrated by J.K. Potter’s wonder-
ful photorealistic montages) is also a
sequel, in this case to his Philip K. Dick
Award-winning steampunk extrava-
ganza Homunculus. And the tripartite
tale of Lord Kelvin’s Machine is every
bit as good, each part revolving around
the plots of the evil Ignacio Narbondo,
who murders the wife of the gentleman
scientist, Langdon St. Ives, in the open-
ing pages, and the electromagnetic
accumulator invented by Lord Kelvin
to thwart Narbondo’s plan to draw a
comet down upon the Earth.

Narbondo plunges to bis doom in an
Arctic tarn at the end of the first tale,
but revival of his corpse is the centre
of not one but two opposing schemes;
and Lord Kelvin’s device is stolen and
used to sink ships and so hold the
British government to ransom, and
then forms the heart of a time-machine
with which St. Ives plans his ultimate
revenge on Narbondo.

Each tale is jigsawed together from
a dozen conceits which fit so perfectly
that to try and tease but every strand
shatters the whole irretrievably;
Blaylock is an absurdist (as distinct
from absurd) fantasist whose tales are
resonant with a fine nostalgia for a Vic-
torian London that never was, a lost
era of moral certainty and infernal
devices where marching Peruvians
and a Rawls-Hibbing Mechanical
Bladder can detonate volcanoes and
tip the Earth’s orbit, and where der-
ring-do can always (in the end) win the
day. Recommended.

S ometimes, the first have to be last,
but not necessarily the least. And
Disregards the Rest (Gollancz, £14.99)
is Australian writer Paul Voermans’s
first novel, vigorous and confident,
and richly authentic despite a plot
Philip K. Dick would have blushed to
use.

It works backwards towards the
unravelling of precisely what hap-
pened when an experimental produc-
tion of The Tempest, staged in the
Australian bush, was overwhelmed by
a flash flood during dress rehearsal.
Eleven years later, Kevin Gore, one of
the few survivors of the cast and crew,
is hearing voices and finds that his
blood has turned blue, which may
have something to do with strange vis-
ions experienced by people across the
world, or which may be because he’s
going as crazy as his friend Martin
Ley wood , anothersurvivor who is now
in a mental hospital. Craziness soon
becomes relative, as the novel alter-
nates between passages from Leywood’s

64 Interzone July 1992

unpublished account of the affair and
Kevin’s attempts to find the truth, and
interleaves detailed realism of
accounts of the working of avant-garde
theatrical productions and the vibrant
otherness of the bush that surrounds
Australian suburban civilization with
a centrifugal plot held together only by
the force of Voermans’s writing.

The tangled sci-fi resolution, involv-
ing UFOs and alien telepathy and alter-
nate worlds, almost but not quite dis-
solves into an illogical mishmash, but
the saving grace is the care Voermans
takes over his cast of characters. When
we finally reach back to the flood, it is
both powerfully strange and apocalyp-
tic and elegiac, and despite the silly
resolution, which by their own
momentum the characters transcend
to achieve a peace of their own, And
Disregards the Rest is the debut of a
powerful and distinctive new vqjce.

(Paul J. McAuley)

Divine Right of
Kings

Wendy Bradley

t i ' I ’ he nature of kingship” is one
X. of those old philosophical
questions you don’t hear much about
these days, possibly on account of its
being about as relevant as the angels
on the pinhead. Practical power
devolving by the whims of heredity is
something you come across almost
exclusively in fantasy novels, where it
has the obvious benefits of simplifying
your plot, concentrating your major
characters and sketching in your sys-
tem of government in the first casual
scattering of titles.

Kingship is the philosophical point
rather than idle shorthand in The Dra-
gonToken (Daw, $20), Melanie Rawn’s
latest episode in the “what are we
going to do now Rohan is dead?” saga.
Rawn has set up the situation as a con-
flict about the nature of kingship, kil-
ling off her attractive hero Rohan and
leaving his kin and country to cope
with an invasion without him. His son
Pol is trying and so far failing to be the
kind of king his father was, and a very
few others have realized that, in the
circumstances in which they find
themsefves, a Rohan-like king isn’t
necessarily what is needed.

The philosophical conceit might be
interesting if it were explored in more
depth, but this is really only a middle-
third-of-trilogy piece, in which Pol has
a bad attack of the Hamlets, Sioned
seeks consolation in the bottom of a
bottle, Andry spends much of his time
'wandering around wearing someone
else’s face and Meggy wanders around
the desert with a large metaphorical

neon sign saying POL’S WIFE —
PLEASE KIDNAP. And we still haven’t
the faintest idea what the Bad Guys
from Over the Sea want, and I still had
to consult the index of characters every
thirty pages. The trouble with this sort
of stuff is that if it’s even only halfway
decently written it’s utterly addictive.
This is more than halfway decent— vol-
ume three right now please.

M argaret Weis’s solo space opera
comes to a conclusion in King’s
Sacrifice (Bantam, £4.99) in which she
also considers the nature of kingship.
Dion, last survivor of the Blood Royal
aside from his guardians Maigrey and
the ambivalent Sagan, lives to scoop
the prizes and move back to the Glitter
Palace along with a lot of cameramen
and footmen straight out of the last
episode of Cinderella crossed with
JFK. Although armed with literally
genetically superior Blood Royal, Dion
gets to do very little except stand
around and look pretty a lot while the
characters grandstand at each other.
This is addictive but cack-handed
stuff: Dion is ambushed by being pre-
sented with a gaggle of walking
wounded looking to him for miracle
cures while he is being broadcast to
the galaxy: the fiendish plot is to make
him look callous if he ignores them or
like a jerk if he attempts a miraculous
healing and fails. The idea that he
could attempt a miracle and succeed
is dismissed but the idea which
instantly springs to the reader’s mind
is why on earth (or any other lookalike
planet) should there be all these halt
and lame and deaf and blind in a galaxy
where there are genetically engineered
viruses and cyborgs on every street
corner. Well OK, but Weis then draws
attention to the ineptitude by having
Sagan point out to Dion that he could
have just given them all the name of a
good plastic surgeon. Puh-Jease!

I was particularly offended by the
presence of the infodump character.
Brother Miguel, whom Brother Fideles
finds hiding in the walls of the abhey
after all the inhabitants have heen zom-
bified. Miguel explains to Fideles how
it happened, warns him the whole
place is a trap — and then Fideles goes
off to rescue Sagan and make his
escape leaving Miguel where he was!
If you can’t handle one little old redun-
dant character (have him tag along
gratefully as far as the shuttle and then
get heroically shot shielding Fideles
from a stray bullet, springs to mind
without even having to think about it),
then in my view one shouldn’t be
attempting a multi-planet mega-saga at
all. However it’s done now and it’s not
that bad. Mostly.

P lainsong by Deborah Grahien (Pan,
£4.50) is a sort of girly Siddhartha
which ups the ante from kingship to
godhead. Basically it’s a New Age

fantasy where all the nasty old grown-
ups are dead apart from a few magi and
the Mother. All the children survive to
cook fruit pies and commune tele-
pathically with animals until the Child
is born. It turns out that yer godhead
is only rented out temporarily, see, and
so the Son has had his couple of mil-
lennia and has to push off for the wheel
to turn and the, er. Daughter to take
over so that everything can be nice and
groovy. You will gather I enjoyed it
rather more than I expected, which
isn’t saying a whole lot. However I
highly recommend bookshop brow-
sers to read the prologue — it’s only half
a page and it’s a damn good joke.

I n Damia (Bantam, £13.99) Anne
McCaffrey does another Rowan -
i.e. takes one of her best short stories
and picks it apart so that both the plot
and character unravel. People with
honourable bit parts in the short stag-
ger under a crushing load of inconsis-
tent characterization in the long ver-
sion. However at least she has cut her
most offensive line of all, the one about
physical domination being the essence
of sexual attraction.

Finally, Dean R. Koontz is on top
form in Hideaway (Headline, £14.99)
when he has his hero, Hatch Harrison,
rescued from a car crash into a freezing
river and resuscitated after a world-
record-beating time dead. After that
Hatch finds he has developed some
weird psychic link with a psychotic
killer who poses his victims before,
during and after their murders in blas-
phemous worship around the old
demon statue in the abandoned fair-
ground. Don’t Americans think to clear
out abandoned fairgrounds routinely
for manic satanists and other cliches?
Ah well. Hatch and his splendidly
realized wife Lindsay nevertheless
manage to rescue their adopted daugh-
ter in the usual grandstand climax.
Koontz’s strength is that his characters
are just like us: they have read the
books and seen the movies, so that at
the end Hatch and Lindsay not only go
chasing after the bad guy armed with
a crucifix but they remember to take a
gun and torch each and to call the cops
on the car phone on the way.

(Wendy Bradley)

Discovering
Charles de Lint

Ken Brown

L et’s get the sf over with first. Short
I Blade by Peter R. Emshwiller (Ban-
tam, $4.99) requires me to make a con-
fession. I’m sure all reviewers come
across a book that they just find impos-
sible to read. This is one of those. So I
am unqualified to comment on it.

Venus Rising by Carol Emshwiller
(Peter R.’s mother, I believe) is a 36-
page small-press publication from
Edgewood Press, (PO.Box 264, Cam-
bridge, MA 02238, USA; $5). It’s set in
a mythical past loosely based on pre-
history as described by Elaine Morgan
(for those who’ve not read The Descent
of Woman, the idea is that the immedi-
ate ancestors of the modern human
species lived a partly aquatic life,
hence our relative hairlessness, sub-
cutaneous fat and near-webbed fin-
gers). It is an account of the ravishing
of a woman of the relaxed, lazy, mater-
nal beach people by a man from the
tree people. He is a bureaucratic, pater-
nal, violent, officious, self-important
little prick (literally) and the whole
thing is an obvious feminist fable. I
liked it.

Dark Matter by Garfield Reeves-
Stevens (Pan, £4.99) is another sesial-
killer book. Someone associated with
a team of quantum physicists is com-
mitting particularly gruesome mur-
ders by trepanning conscious victims
and fondling their brains - it’s all
described in great detail in the first
chapter in enough detail to have put
me off reading the rest if I hadn’t been
about to review it. The book is sold as
sf but there is a police procedural
inside trying to get out. The science
(mostly quantum physics) is well
enough done but not really central to
the plot, except for the deus-ex-
machina ending, which I could have
done without. The depiction of the sci-
entists, especially the central genius,
seems shallow and unpersuasive: I
preferred Kate Duvall, the politically
correct black detective with a mess of
a personal life who is trying to piece
together the background to the killings.
She has the makings of a good charac-
ter. Were I the editor I would have tried
to cut the first 12 pages and most of the
last hundred and promote it as a thril-
ler.

The Silent Warrior by L.E. Modesitt,
Jr (Tor, $3.99), Volume 2 of “The
Forever Hero” and sequel to Dawn for
a Distant Earth, could almost have
been titled “Pale Green Lensman and
Empire.” MacGregor Gerswin, removed
from his post on devastated Earth, is
given a pre-retirement command on a
dead-end maintenance hase. Naturally
he upgrades it to a first-class shipyard,
fathers a few children, and starts a
revolution or two, all the while meddl-
ing in the affairs of the Admiralty and
the Assassins Guild through a vast
trust fund and a secretive research
foundation in order to inflnence the
inevitable fall of the Empire. Yes, read-
ers, this is Space Opera.

It’s all good fun, but I have a few
quibbles. First, this volume goes no
further than the previous one towards
describing (never mind explaining)
the political and ecological disasters
that are supposed to have destroyed

old Earth and to be about to destroy
the new Empire. Also it all seems
rather odd that both the inexorable
workings of the dead hand of History,
and the last hope of democracy, per-
sonal freedom, and a productive
economy, depend on a secretive and
immensely rich superhero. Sort of Bat-
man joins the anarcho-syndicalists.
And we still haven’t cleared up the
problem of the impenetrable fortress.

P olar City Blues by Katharine Kerr
(Grafton, £3.99) is also fun. Yet
more murders, this time of alien dip-
lomats on the (mostly) human planet
Hagar. The police telepath on the scene
is shocked into near-catatonia and his
friends and relations run around look-
ing under the stones of a civilization
that is more-or-less a punky California
in space. It’s all written in the present
tense, which takes a few pages to get
used to but helps build a feeling of ten-
sion and speed. The protagonist, a
retired space-pilot and information
broker, just happens to have a friend
with the fastest space ship in the sys-
tem, access to the best-developed AI
on the planet and turns out to be the
sister of the local crime boss as well. I
suppose if these people were ordinary
the book wouldn’t be about them.

There’s a nifty appendix that tells
you all about baseball. I can’t say
whether it’s any good or not because I
know hardly anything about baseball.
It is helpful when reading Stephen Jay
Gould though.

When I read The World at the End
of Time by Frederik Pohl (Grafton,
£4.99) I decided to start the review
with “they don’t write that any more.”
But from the previous two books it’s
obvious that they do. Old-fashioned
space opera is alive and well and pub-
lished in New York and London. A lot
of it depends on the scale of the action
- space is notoriously very, very big
and forever is a long long time. The
World at the End of Time takes rather
more than 10 to the 40 years of the stuff,
following the careers of two very diffe-
rent characters. One is a vast and cruel
energy being who lives inside stars
(when it can find them) and doesn’t
really believe that slimy, horrid, sticky
matter conld snpport life. The other is
a human who survives that long
through all the normal sf methods:
freezer compartments in colony ships,
time dilation in both directions due to
both space travel and absurd gravita-
tional potentials, getting caught up in
a tiny (about ten light years across) out-
pouching of the universe in which
time flows differently, being set adrift
in a small wrecked spaceship and
freezing himself again, falling foul of
religious fanatics and being frozen yet
again for his crimes, some serious
genetic engineering . . . you get the pic-
ture.

This is a Good Read. If you don’t
interzone July 1992 65

know the Hertzprung Russell diagram
when you start reading it, you will
when you finish. And if the ability of
the puny humans to out-think and out-
last the most powerful, knowledgeable
and intelligent beings in the universe
makes a nonsense of the plot, that is
no more than we have been trained to
expect by the past fifty years of this
sort of stuff. I probably had more fun
with it than with any of the other books
reviewed here.

N ow to fantasy. Suisan by Phyllis
Carol Agins (Baen, $4.99) is not a
good start. An attempt at a rewriting of
“Snow White,” with a lot of rather pur-
ple prose, a little sordid sex and a few
weird ideas about the mystic proper-
ties of minerals and the reproductive
habits of Dwarves, it is a near-turkey.
And why oh why does the dwarf with
the gift of prophecy have to be called
Dylan?

Darker Than the Storm by Freda
Warrington (NEL, £4.99) is another
piece of green pleading, this time
embedded in a sword-and-sorcery
hack-fest. Ashurek of Gorethria is an
exiled warrior lord with a dubious past
who seems to have taken some vow not
to use his sword again (it can’t be a
very strict vow because he had dis-
posed of a spiderlike monster, a thief
and something like half a dozen city
guards before I lost count). He is cast
out from the School of Sorcery on
Ikonus for illicitly opening a Way
between Worlds and fetches up in
Jhensit, a world riven by civil and
religious strife. The ruling classes have
turned their backs on growing things
and the soil (gardening is illegal,
indeed blasphemous) and all the elec-
tric power for the city comes from a
suggestive White Dome, which also
serves as a prison.

Jhensit is the victim of a terrible dis-
aster, the planet itself is breaking up,
losing parts of itself to an extra-dimen-
sional chaos. The reason for this is
bound up in some way with the situa-
tion back on Ikonus. The story holds
together better than many of it’s kind
- clues to the nature of the catastrophe
are scattered throughout almost in the
manner of a detective story. And yes,
there is a serial killer. Not literature,
but one for a decent train journey.

In Dragon Season by Michael Cas-
sutt (Tor, $4.99) Richard Walsh, a US
airforce officer, returns from a long
tour of duty to find that his girlfriend
has disappeared leaving a new-born
baby. It is a straightforward alternate-
world, well-written, with few plot sur-
prises. The description of military life
has a ring of truth about it, appearing
to me to be more realistic than the typ-
ical macho fantasies of the average pot-
boiler. Cassutt’s airforce is more like
IBM than the SAS. Of course, the only
US airforce officers I have ever talked
to about their work were on an IBM

system programming course at the
time so I can’t exactly claim to be an
expert.

Y arrow by Charles de Lint (Pan,
£7.99) is the story of Caitlin
Midhir, a Canadian fantasy writer who
gets her wacky ideas from dreams. One
day the dreams cease. At the same time
the police are investigating yet another
series of rather gruesome murders of
more-or-less unattractive people. Of
course, as this is a fantasy, it turns out
that the murderer is a sort of mind vam-
pire who has been stealing her dreams.
Well, it’s a wonderful excuse for wri-
ter’ block.

Spiritwalk (Tor, $19.95), also by
Charles de Lint, is a sequel to the 1984
book Moonheart (still available from
Pan in the UK). I was sufficiently
impressed by the first few pages to go
out and look for a copy of the older
book. *

Just in passing, has anyone else
noticed an improvement in the fiction
kept by W.H. Smith’s? I failed to find
Moonheart in three well-known book-
shops around the Charing Cross Road
and came across it almost by accident
in the Lewisham branch of Smith’s.
More impressively, they now have a
“twentieth-century fiction” section
(roughly: Booker-nominees, as-seen-
on-the-BBC, South Americans and just
plain novels) which is a big improve-
ment on the genre-and-Penguin dis-
plays they ran until a few months ago .

Both Moonheart and Spiritwalk are
set in and around a vast, unlikely
house in Ottawa which is (how did we
all guess?) one of those places where
the walls round our world are thin. In
Moonheart the house itself defends its
occupants from a magical assault
while the police and some monsters
from Beyond besiege it. Spiritwalk
consists of four short pieces which
establish the background of Tamson
House and a novella, “Ghostwood,”
which, like Moonheart, is essentially
an adventure story set in many worlds,
with a diverse cast of characters flitting
in and out of the fields we know trying
to get the house back from the evil
spirit that is attempting to displace the
Guardian of the house.

All three of the de Lint books,
despite superficially different plots,
share the same structure. Someone is
in danger from enemies who turn out
to be magical. The Royal Canadian
Mounted Police get involved. A large
cast of "characters is brought on stage.
Most of them can’t quite believe what
is happening. Someone goes into an
Otherworld (they seem to be about
equally populated by Ojibway sha-
mans and ancient Welsh druids), from
which they return with magical help
of some sort, just in time for everyone
to turn up at the same spot for the
dramatic denouement, usually involv-
ing a noble act of self-sacrifice. I love

them and find them reading-with-a-
torch-under-the-covers material.

A word of warning about this review
- de Lint is one of those writers who
likes to fill his work with cultural refer-
ences, to clothes, motorbikes, sf and
music. And they are exactly my cul-
tural references. Everybody who
matters in these books either reads sf
and fantasy or is a mythical character
themselves, and they read books I have
read or come from various bits of myth
with which I am familiar.

Music is present throughout all three
books, mostly folk, but ranging from
punk to reggae, mentioning the Clash,
Alan Stivell, Robin Williamson, Billy
Bragg and others. How many North
Americans have even heard of Billy
Bragg? If de Lint’s taste is a little quieter
then mine, maybe even tinged with the
dreaded New Age (someone said it was
like listening to the fabric conditioner
going round your washing machine),
well, that’s explained by him being on
the wrong side of the Atlantic, a few
years older than me (I guess) and living
in Ottawa of all places.

Ottawa is the heart of the matter. I
suspect that Mr de Lint may be one of
those people who read The Weirdstone
of Brisingamen and The Moon ofGom-
rath as a child and actually looked up
the references at the back. (I did, and
he either reads all the same books as
me or else has a very keen eye for pro-
duct placement.) He then decided to
write fantasies based in his home
town. I’ve never been there (who has?)
but by reputation it’s a bit like
Basingstoke transplanted to the mid-
dle of nowhere. As far as I know it
became capital of Canada because it
was the only town of any size on the
Ontario-Quebec border, and it wasn’t
even called Ottawa to start with but
Bytown. They gave it a native Ameri-
can name because it sounded better for
a capital. Its major (Quebecois) suburb
is called Hull (good French name,
that). To make such a place into a
Citadel of Faerie shows amazing pat-
riotism, faith, even heroism on Mr de
Lint’s part. (Ken Brown)

Deft Borrowings

Chris Gilmore

A s someone remarks in Stations of
the Tide by Michael Swanwick
(Legend, £7.99), there’s no such thing
as a new story. In default of that, Swan-
wick has assembled features from a
number of sources and embedded
them into the matrix of a psychological
detective tale, set on a distant world of
the far future. By way of disarming
criticism, he mentions in the acknow-
ledgements “riffs lifted from C.L.
Moore, Dylan Thomas, Brian Aldiss,

66 int«*r*»in‘ July 1992

Ted Hughes and Jamaica Kincaid [that]
are too blatant to pass unacknow-
ledged.” To which I can add in short
order Katherine MacLean, Frank Her-
bert and Lester del Key. Criticism is
disarmed less by his frankness than the
exceedingly good job he has made. The
story is much like an expansion oijjack
Vance’s “Moon Moth,” but the style
and atmosphere belong more to Gene
Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus. In
saying this much, I’ve said enough for
the knowledgeable to rush out and buy
it. Only the less clued-in need read on.

The world Miranda once harboured
an intelligent race, the haunts, but
these have been negligently extin-
guished by the human colonists, a
crime for which no one feels much
guilt any more; besides, a few may still
exist, passing for human. On the other
hand, the colonists feel deep resent-
ment against the developed worlds
which have placed Miranda under cul-
tural embargo; only a trickle of hi-tech
goodies are allowed, nor is indepen-
dent invention encouraged. Culture is
largely conditioned by the extreme
planetary climate, which involves
drowning of the lowlands every “Great
Year.” Native fauna routinely adapt
between terrestrial and aquatic forms,
and many humans envy them the abil-
ity. As they are also imbued with all
sorts of sinister superstitions which, in
the manner of such books, keep on
being validated by events, it’s not sur-
prising that the favourite scam of the
villain of the piece, Gregorian, is to
offer them the means of doing so.

To this world comes an unnamed
bureaucrat, trying to prevent Grego-
rian from importing embargoed
technology, though with so little overt
means of enforcement that one won-
ders why anyone bothers to frustrate
him. However, he is drugged, beaten
up, seduced, kidnapped and con-
versed with by the natives, not to men-
tion his own associates, at least one of
whom, he soon realizes, must be in
league with Gregorian. So the book
enjoyably progresses through the car-
nival of grotesques which makes up
Mirandan society at the turning of the
Year, with occasional forays into the
even grotesquer worlds of hi-tech
bureaucracy to which the protagonist
reports. Neither style nor pace flags,
and the climax is surprising and
thoroughly satisfying.

With so many engaging touches (I
hope not all borrowed) the few false
notes are barely worth recording, but
one lies in Swanwick’s retelling of the
story of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
The embellishments are fair enough,
but the story is essentially the same as
ever — he doesn’t transmute it while
leaving it instantly recognizable as
Wolfe does. This wouldn’t matter any-
where else, but the book reads so like
Wolfe that here it sticks out as a shock-
ing failure. Another is when he commits

the common malapropism of aureole
for areola. A woman is incomplete
without two of the latter, but more than
one of the former would be in doubtful
taste. All right? Got it now? And don’t
get them mixed up again - it can really
ruin your love scenes. Whaddya mean,
you already knew? I said this bit was
only for the less clued-in!

{Chris Gilmore)

Wrong About
Worms

Andy Robertson

T here are always problems in read-
ing genre fiction if you have too
deep a knowledge of the background,
and science fiction is no exception.Jt’s
not a matter of sf writers having too
bold and brave a vision, but rather that
all the cutest ideas turn out to have been
disproved decades ago. For example:
people do not have “pleasure centres”
in their brains. White rats may press
the button 12,000 times a day, but
human volunteers under electronic
stimulation just feel vaguely uncom-
fortable and itchy. So, in theory, we
should say goodbye to tasps, wirehead-
ing and current-addiction, and, unfor-
tunately, goodbye to the best metaphor
for the pure social phenomenon of
addiction that anyone has ever
imagined. It just won’t happen.

Or take the idea that memory has a
chemical basis — that you can learn by
eating RNA pills. This was based on
an experiment with planarian worms,
where they taught worm(l) to negotiate
a maze and then fed it to worm(2) and
found that worm(2) learned the maze
faster. Impressive, until you realize
that well-fed worms naturally learn
fastest, and planarian worm is the best
food for planarian worm. Worm(3) had
never been anywhere near the maze,
but when they minced it up and fed it
to worm(4], then worm(4) learned the
maze just as fast as worm(2) had.

Science fiction is full of these ideas
— ideas which were borrowed superfi-
cially from the sciences, but are actu-
ally attractive and persistent because
they have roots in the myths of the
wider culture. Despite my protest at
the start of this review, I don’t think
this is a bad thing. Far from it. Sf is a
literature, not a branch of science, and
it quite rightly grabs ideas from all
over. That’s what sf is about - stretch-
ing across the interface between the
radically new knowledges the sciences
keep revealing, and the myths and par-
ables by which human beings continu-
ally simplify and humanize their
knowledge. It doesn’t matter if sf is
inexact, so long as it’s lively, and so
long as it keeps real input from both
sides alive and bubbling.

T he first book under review is
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers
on the Computer Frontier by Katy
Haffner and John Markoff (Fourth
Estate, £14.99). It is an account of real-
life computer hacking, and my mean-
dering introduction is an attempt to
link it, however tenuously, with sf.
Despite the title and the endorsements
by Messrs Gibson & Sterling on the
back cover, this is actually rather
difficult to do. Very few sf writers have
got their technology as badly wrong as
the cyberpunks did, and in very few
cases can it have mattered as little. The
idea of “cyberspace,” one of the key
cyberpunk images, is a completely
inaccurate picture of computer
technology: in fact, like the pseudo-
scientific ideas I mentioned earlier,
“cyberspace” really derives from pre-
technological myths — in this case, the
idea of the soul or spirit being separa-
ble from the body, wandering and
adventuring in a supernatural realm,
meeting gods and demons. Bad sci-
ence; non-existent technology; but
excellent sf, because it touches on and
revivifies a whole stratum of ancient
legends, not to mention our own sub-
jective experience when dreaming.
And, therefore, it has produced some
good books.

But (in case anyone ever imagined
different) real computers aren’t like
that, and real computer hackers aren’t
like that. Moreover, real computing
isn’t ever likely to develop in that
direction. Good pre-cyberpunk writers
like Brunner and Budrys were more
accurate in their picture of the technol-
ogy. At the moment, as everyone who
works in it knows, commercial com-
puting is a mess — not even a creative
mess, but just a crawling, metastasiz-
ing, messy mess, endlessly repatched
and retrofitted, torn apart by diverging
standards, and stubbornly lacking any-
thing like viable self-organization, let
alone the genesis of godlike intelli-
gence. If anything, the mess is getting
worse as computers get bigger and fas-
ter. Cyberpunk is a pretty good
description of the careers of three
major hackers — people who have
learned to nose out interesting and/or
mischief-making scraps of information
from this mess -but unsurprisingly the
hackers themselves form a more
interesting study than the hacking.

I won’t go into the book in more
detail. It is an excellent bit of jour-
nalism, clearly written, and full of
relevant technical and personal infor-
mation, but not too heavy for the non-
specialist. I have to confess that I didn’t
find it very interesting, but then I’m a
systems programmer myself and I
know too much about the background
to be gobsmacked by hearing it all
again. If you want to know about the
social phenomenon of hacking and
you form part of the 0.05% of Inter-
zone’s readers who are not already

intt^rzono July 1992 67

involved in commercial DP, I don’t
think you could buy a better introduc-
tion.

I also have a . . . well . . . bookoid entity
to review called Strange Weather:
Culture, Science, and Technology in
the Age of Limits by Andrew Ross
(Verso, £10.95). I think there are some
cogent ideas in here, but I’m afraid
most of the book is so badly written
that, to borrow a siinile from the
sainted Myles, it sounds like dirty
water being squirted out of a hole in a
burst rubber ball. The Plain Readers of
Interzone should consider a certain
book reviewer that you know and I
know: his stuff is a joy at page length,
but imagine it two hundred pages long,
minus all the wit and some of the
brains, and you have about the style of
Strange Weather.

Trapped in all this is a meditation
on public perceptions of science and
technology that does have some good
bits. The mythos of the future, increas-
ingly apocalyptic, is viewed from
several angles: New Ageism, hacking,
science fiction, ecodoom. Cyberpunk
has a separate chapter all to itself: Ross
knows his sf, and is impressed, but the
Mirrorshades get told off for being to
white and too male — it’s that sort of_
book. There are few conclusions drawn,
and any in-depth analyses are in the
sort of opaque leftspeak that makes the
head go round and round after a couple
of super-long sentences. While not
exactly a Marxist, or not prepared to
admit it, Ross still has the habit of
thinking in watertight paradigms that
explain everything, and since he is
actually (and quite honestly) full of
doubts the book is an exercise in stop-
go. In one paragraph we may think we
are heading towards something defi-
nite, but in the next we are off on a
tangent again. It’s all very confusing.

I can’t recommend the book, but I
wouldn’t want to totally trash it.
There’s some good stuff here if you dig
hard enough, and if Ross only took a
course in Plain English he might pro-
duce something really worthwhile.

(Andy Robertson)

UK Books Received

March 1992

The following is a list of all sf, fantasy and
horror titles, and books ofrelated interest,
received by Interzone during the month
specified above. Official publication dates,
where known, are given in italics at the end
of each entry. Descriptive phrases in quotes
following titles are taken from book covers
rather than title pages. A listing here does
not preclude aseparate review in this issue
(or in a future issue) of the magazine.

Asprin, Robert. M.Y.T.H. Inc. in Action.
Arrow/Legend, ISBN 0-09-993500-7,
245pp, paperback, £3.99. (Humorous fan-
tasy novel, first published in the USA, 1990;
ninth in the “Myth” series.) 2nd April 1992.

68 interzone July 1992

Baer, Freddie. Ecstatic Incisions: The Col-
lages of Freddie Baer. Preface by Peter Lam-
born Wilson. AK Press [3 Balmoral Place,
Stirling, Scotland FK8 2RD], ISBN 1-
873176-60-0, 74pp, trade paperback, £7.95
[$11.95 USA]. (Fantasy art book, first edi-
tion; Freddie Baer is a contributor to Inter-
zone as well as SF Eye and other magazines;
we recommend her work highly.) March (?)
1992.

Banks, Iain M. Use of Weapons. Mac-
donald/Orbit, ISBN 0-7088-8358-3, 379pp,
paperback, £5.99. (Sf novel, first published
in 1990; reviewed by John Clute in Inter-
zone 48.) 26th March 1992.

Cartmel, Andrew. Cat’s Cradle: Warhead.
“The New Doctor Who Adventures.” Vir-
gin/Doctor Who, ISBN 0-426-20367-4,
262pp, paperback, £3,50. (Shared-universe
sf novel, first edition.) 16th April 1992.

Cook, Glen. The Black Company. “The First
Chronicle of The Black Company.” Pen-
guin/Roc, ISBN 0-14-016553-3, 319pp,

paperback, £4.99. (Fantasy novel, first pub-
lished in the USA, 1984.) 26th March 1992.

Cook, Hugh. The Worshippers and the
Way. “Chronicles of an Age of Darkness,
Volume 9.” Corgi, ISBN 0-552-13848-7,
380pp, paperback, £4.99. (Fantasy novel,
first edition.) 23rd April 1992.

Dillard, J.M. Star Trek VI: The Undisco-
vered Country. Grafton, ISBN 0-586-21660-
X, 301pp, paperback, £3.99. (Sf noveliza-
tion, first published in the USA, 1992;
based on the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer
andDenny Martin Flinn.) 26th March 1992.

Donnelly, Joe. The Shee. Century, ISBN 0-
7126-5022-9, 407pp, hardcover, £14.99.
(Horror novel, first edition.) 2nd April
1992.

Donnelly, Joe. Stone. Arrow, ISBN 0-09-
983110-4, 514pp, paperback, £4.99. (Horror
novel, first published in 1990; reviewed by
Paul Brazier in Interzone 46.) 2nd April
1992.

Du Maurier, Daphne. The Birds and Other
Stories. Arrow, ISBN 0-09-986640-4,
237pp, paperback, £4.99. (Horror/suspense
collection, first published as The Apple
Tree, 1952; later republished under the pre-
sent title by Pan Books in 1977.) 2nd April
1992.

Du Maurier, Daphne. The House on the
Strand. Arrow, ISBN 0-09-986570-X,
288pp, paperback, £4.99. (Timeslip ,
romance, first published in 1969.) 2nd
April 1992.

Evaris, Christopher. Chimeras. Grafton,
ISBN 0-586-21304-X, 173pp, paperback,
£5.99. (Fantasy novel, first edition; Evans’s
first new book in quite some time, it consists
of a story cycle, parts of which have
appeared in various anthologies and
magazines over the past several years.) 9th
April 1992.

Farmer, Philip Jose. Dayworld Breakup.
Grafton, ISBN 0-586-21121-7, 366pp,

paperback, £4.99. (Sf novel, first published
in the USA, 1990; sequel to Dayworld and
Dayworld Rebel.) 26th March 1992.

Feist, Raymond E., and Janny Wurts. Ser-
vant of the Empire. Grafton, ISBN 0-586-
20381-8, 827pp, paperback, £5.99. (Fantasy
novel, first published in the USA, 1990;
sequel to Daughter of the Empire ; according
to the biographical notes on the authors,
Janny Wurts is married to the artist Don
Maitz, “whose painting adorns the cover of
Servant of the Empire”; but not on this edi-
tion, which in fact has a cover by British
artist Geoff Taylor.) 9th April 1992.

Gentle, Mary, and Roz Kaveney, eds. Vil-
lains! “Midnight Rose Books. Created by
Mary Gentle and Neil Gaiman.” Penguin/

Roc, ISBN 0-14-014561-3, 337pp, paper-
back, £4.99. (Shared-world fantasy anthol-
ogy, first edition; as with the last “Midnight
Rose” book. The Weerde, Neil Gaiman has
a credit on front cover and spine although
he’s not actually named as an editor on the
title page; this volume, the first to appear
in the third “braid” of Midnight Rose’s out-
put, contains original stories by Stephen
Baxter, Keith Brooke, Molly Brown, Storm
Constantine, David Langford, Alex Stewart,
Charles Stross and others; most of these
names seem vaguely familiar to us from
somewhere,,,) 26th March 1992.

Gilluly, Sheila. The Giant of Inishkerry:
The Second Book of the Painter. Headline,
ISBN 0/7472-0503-5, 281pp, hardcover,
£15,99. (Fantasy novel, first edition [?];
proof copy received.) 9th July 1992.

Grey, Rudolph. Nightmare of Ecstasy: The
Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Feral
House [UK & European distribution by
Turnaround, 27 Horsfell Rd., London N5
IXL], 231pp, trade paperback, £9.99. (Biog-
raphy of a horror-film director, first edition;
Wood is famous as one of the worst movie-
makers who ever lived, so we assume this
is a camp item strictly for schlock lovers;
we may be wrong, though ~ who knows?)
16th April 1992.

Hart, John. Jizz: The Story of a New Renais-
sance Man and the Riddle of Existence.

Black Swan, ISBN 0-552-99487-1, 285pp,
paperback, £5.99. (Humorous sf novel, first
edition; a debut novel by an author who
lives in Brighton [as does that other funny
chap, Robert Rankin — see below].) 23rd
April 1992.

Jacobson, Howard. The Very Model of a
Man. Viking, ISBN 0-670-84338-5, 342pp,
hardcover, £14.99, (Fantasy novel, first edi-
tion; by a well-known humorous novelist,
this is a Biblical fantasy about Cain,
described by its publishers as “a divine dark
comedy of the darkest shade.”) 3'Ofh April
1992.

Kennealy, Patricia. The Copper Crown: A
Book of The Keltiad. Grafton, ISBN 0-586-
06831-7, 512pp, paperback, £4.99. (Fantasy
novel, first published in the USA, 1984;
second in this series about space-going
Celts; reviewed by Peter Garratt in Inter-
zone 19.) 26th March 1992.

1

Kerr, Katharine. A Time of Omens: A Novel
of the Westlands. HarperCollins, ISBN 0-
586-13781-9, 354pp, hardcover, £14.99.
(Fantasy novel, first edition[?]; sequel to A
Time of Exile in the “Westlands Cycle”;
proof copy received ; there is a simultaneous
trade paperback edition [not seen] ,) 1st June
1992.

Kilworth, Garry. Midnight’s Sun; A Story
of Wolves. Grafton, ISBN 0-586-21495-X,
317pp, paperback, £4.99. (Fantasy novel,
first published in 1990; reviewed by Paul
McAuley in Interzone 43.) 26th March
1992.

Koontz, Dean R. The Funhouse. Headline,
ISBN 0-7472-0560-4, 306pp, hardcover,
£15.99. (Horror novelization, first pub-
lished in the USA under the- pseudonym
“Owen West,” 1980; based on a screenplay
by Larry Block; proof copy received.) 13th
August 1992.

Lawhead, Stephen. The Paradise War:
Song of Albion, Book One. Lion, ISBN 0-
7549-2242-2, 416pp, trade paperback,

£7.99. (Fantasy novel, first published in
1991; reviewed by Wendy Bradley in Inter-
zone 50.) 27th March 1992.

Le Guin, Ursula. Searoad: Chronicles of
Klatsand. Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-05277-5,
ISBN 0-575-05277-5, 193pp, hardcover,
£14.99, (Collection by a major sf/fantasy
author; first published in the USA, 1991;

despite its fantasy-sounding title, this is
described as a “completely mainstream
book,” a story-cycle about the lives of
women in the Pacific north-west over the
past century; parts of the book were first
published in the New Yorker, the Missouri
Review, the Kenyon Review and other such
literary journals, 1987-91.] 2nd April 1992.

Martin, David. Bring Me Children. Head-
line, ISBN 0-7472-0445-4, 310pp, hard-
cover, £15.99. (Horror/suspense novel, first
published in the USA, 1992; about “a mons-
ter of sadistic ingenuity, a physician whose
mission to heal has been hideously per-
verted.”) 9th April 1992.

May, Julian. Jack the Bodiless: Volume 1 of
The Milieu Trilogy. HarperCollins, ISBN 0-
00-223875-6, 425pp, hardcover, £14.99. (Sf
novel, first published in the USA, 1991.)
6th April 1992.

Morris, Mark. Stitch. Corgi, ISBN 0-552-
13813-4, 526pp, paperback, £4.99. (Horror
novel, first published in 1991; reviewed by
Mary Gentle in Interzone 52.) 19th March
1992.

Rankin, Robert. The Suburban Book of the
Dead. Armageddon III: The Remake.

Bloomsbury, ISBN 0-7475-1165-9, 262pp,
hardcover, £15.99. (Humorous sf/fantasy
novel, first edition.) 16th April 1992.

Rankin, Robert. They Came and Ate Us.
Armageddon II: The B-Movie. Corgi,
ISBNO-552-13832-0, 336pp, paperback,

£3.99. (Humorous sf/fantasy novel, first
published in 1991; reviewed by Paul
McAuley in Interzone 51 .) 23rd April 1992.

Rawn, Melanie. Sunrunner’s Fire; Dragon
Prince, Book Three. Pan, ISBN 0-330-
31752-0, 479pp, paperback, £4.99. (Fantasy
novel, first published in the USA, 1990.)
10th April 1992.

Rovin, Jeff. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of
Cartoon Animals. Simon &Sohuster, ISBN
0-13-275561-0, 327pp, trade paperback,
£13.99. (Directory of cartoon characters,
first published in the USA, 1991; copiously
illustrated and well informed, though
printed on rather sub-standard paper, this
is the Prentice-Hall edition of last year with
a British price-sticker.) 23rd March 1992.

Shaw, Bob. Orbitsville Judgement. Mac-
donald/Orbit, ISBN 0-7088-8362-1, 281pp,
paperback, £3.99. (Sf novel, first published
in 1990; third in the “Orbitsville” trilogy;
reviewed by Paul McAuley in Interzone 4 5 .)
26th Marchl992.

Sheffield, Charles. Transcendence; Book
Three of The Heritage Universe. Gollancz,
ISBN 0-575-05264-3, 270pp, hardcover,
£14.99. (Sf novel, first published in the
USA, 1992.) 9th April 1992.

Silverberg, Ira, ed. Everything is Permitted;
The Making of Naked Lunch. Introductions
by William S. Burroughs and David Cronen-
berg. Grafton, ISBN 0-586-21714-2, 128pp,
trade paperback, £9.99. (Essays on the mak-
ing of the film Naked Lunch, with copious
illustrations; first edition.) 26th March
1992.

Silverberg, Robert. Majipoor Chronicles.
“The second enthralling book in the
Majipoor trilogy.” Pan, ISBN 0-330-28117-
8, 317pp, paperback, £4.99. (Sf/fantasy col-
lection of linked stories, first published in
the USA, 1982.) 6th March 1992.

Slade, Darren, and Nigel Watson. Super-
natural Spielberg. Valis Books [52a Las-
cotts Rd., Wood Green, London N22 4JN],
ISBN 0-9516251-3-6, 136pp, paperback,
£6.99. (Sf/fantasy film criticism, first edi-
tion; it contains chapters on most of Spiel-
berg’s films from Something Evil [1972]
through to Always [1989]; however, there
are no chapters on Duel, Jaws, The Color

Purple, Empire of the Sun and Hook —
perhaps none of these were “supernatural”
enough for the authors, one of whom has
previously written a book on UFOlogy.)
April 1992.

Somtow, S.P. Valentine: Return to Vampire
Junction. Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-05018-7,
383pp, hardcover, £14.99. (Horror novel,
firstpublishedin the USA, 1992; “S.P. Som-
tow” is a form of his name used by Thai-
born author Somtow Sucharitkul.) 9th
April 1992.

Somtow, S.P. Vampire Junction. Gollancz,
ISBN 0-575-05057-8, 362pp, paperback,
£4.99. (Jlorror novel, first published in the
USA, 1984.) 9th April 1992.

Spiegelman, Art. Mans II: And Here My
Troubles Began. Penguin, ISBN 0-14-
013206-6, 136pp, trade paperback, £8.99.
(Graphic novel, first published in the USA,
1991; sequel to the bestselling 1986 Maus,
which dealt with Nazi atrocities in animal-
fable form; it comes with accolades from
Raymond Briggs, Umberto Eco and others.)
26th March 1992.

Stableford, Brian, ed. The Second Dedalus
Book of Decadence: The Black FeaSt.

Dedalus, ISBN 0-946626-80-4, 337pp,

paperback, £8.99. (Horror/fantasy anthol-
ogy, first edition; it includes verse and
prose by Charles Baudelaire, James Elroy
Flecker, Anatole France, J.K, Huysmans,
the Comte de Lautreamont, Vernon Lee,
Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Alger-
non Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and
many others, much of it newly translated
from French by the editor; there’s also a 30-
page introduction by Stableford; recom-
mended.) 31st March 1992.

Stableford, Brian, ed. The Dedalus Book of
Femmes Fatales; A Collection of Contem-
porary and Classic Stories. Dedalus, ISBN
0-946626-77-4, 288pp, paperback, £7.99.
(Horror/fantasy anthology, first edition; the
19th-century reprints include verse and
prose by Keats, Baudelaire, Poe, Swinburne
and others; the original stories are by Bar-
rington Bayley, Storm Constantine, Robert
Irwin, Thomas Ligotti, Ian McDonald, Kim
Newman, Brian Stableford, etc; there’s also
an interesting 25-page introduction by Stab-
leford, and some rather surprising illustra-
tions; recommended.) 19th March 1992.

Stableford, Brian. The Werewolves of Lon-
don. Pan, ISBN 0-330-32267-2, 467pp,
paperback, £4.99. (Sf/fantasy novel, first
published in 1990; reviewed [glowingly] by
John elute in Interzone 43.) 6th March
1992.

Stephensen-Payne, Phil, and Gordon Ben-
son, Jr. Michael Bishop: A Transfigured
Talent - A Working Bibliography. 3rd edi-
tion. “Galactic Central Bibliographies for
the Avid Reader Volume 33.” Galactic Cent-
ral Publications [2 5 A Copgrove Rd., Leeds
LS8 2SP], ISBN 1-871133-32-7, 9-l-38pp,
paperbound, £2. (Author bibliography; the
first edition appeared in 1986.) Late entry:
February 1992 publication, received in
March.

Tuttle, Lisa. Lost Futures. Grafton, ISBN 0-
586-21294-9, 210pp, paperback, £4.99. (Sf
novel, first edition [?] ; proof copy received.)
25th June 1992.

Vardeman, Robert E., and Geo. W. Proctor.
Swords of Raemllyn, Book 1. Hodder/NEL,
ISBN 0-450-56314-6, approx, 600pp, paper-
back, £7.99. (Fantasy omnibus, first edition
[?] ; contains three novels, all first published
in the USA, 1985: To Demons Bound, A
Yoke of Magic and Blood Fountain.) 23rd
April 1992.

Westall, Robert. The Stones of Muncaster
Cathedral; Two Stories of the Super-
natural. Viking, ISBN 0-670-84093-9,

156pp, hardcover, £8.99. (Juvenile horror
collection, first edition; Westall has gained
a good deal of praise as one of Britain’s best
writers of fantastic tales for young adults.)
Late entry: 1991 publication, received in
March 1992.

Williamson, Philip G. The Firstworld
Chronicles, 1: Dinhig of Khimmur. Grafton,
ISBN 0-586-20680-9, 589pp, paperback,
£4.99. (Fantasy novel, first published in
1991; reviewed by Wendy Bradley in Inter-
zone 50.) 26th March 1992.

Wolfe, Gene. Pandora by Holly Hollander.

Hodder/NEL, ISBN 0-450-55345-0, 198pp,
paperback, £3.99. (Fantasy [?] novel, first
published in the USA, 1990.) Late entry:
November 1991 publication, received in
March 1992.

Wurts, Janny. The Master of Whitestorm.
HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-223932-9,
448pp, hardcover, £15.99. (Fantasy novel,
first published in the USA [?], 1992; there
is a simultaneous trade paperback edition
[not seen].] 23rd April 1992.

Zahn, Timothy. Heir to the Empire: Star
Wars, Volume 1. Bantam, ISBN 0-553-
40471-7, 399pp, paperback, £3.99. (Shared-
universe sf novel, first published in the
USA, 1991; the first in a new cycle of “orig-
inal” Star Wars adventures, based on the
characters created by George Lucas.) 23rd
April 1992.

Overseas Books Received

Anthony, Piers. Steppe. Tor, ISBN 0-812-
51922-1, 252pp, paperback, $3.99. (Sf
novel, first published in the UK, 1976; in
an afterword which dates from 1985
Anthony describes how he wrote this book
in 1972, couldn’t sell it to an American pub-
lisher, and eventually placed it with an
obscure British hardcover house.) March
1992.

Asimov, Isaac, and Martin H. Greenberg,
eds, Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF
Stories, #24 (1962). DAW, ISBN 0-88677-
495-0, 348pp, paperback, $5.50. (Sf anthol-
ogy, first edition; this is the two-dozenth
volume in a retrospective best-of-the-year
series which, for some reason, has never
been published in the UK; the current vol-
ume contains well-known and not-so-well-
known 1962 stories by Poul Anderson, J.G.
Ballard, Harry Harrison, Cordwainer
Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, James White
and others.) Late entry: January 1992 publi-
cation, received in March.

Barron, Neil, ed. Fantasy Literature; A
Reader’s Guide. Garland, ISBN 0-8240-
3148-2, 586pp, hardcover, $49.95. (Refer-
ence book, first edition; a valuable critical/
bibliographical resource for information on
the fantasy field past and present, similar
in arrangement to the same editor’s
Anatomy of Wonder [1987; on science fic-
tion]; we’ve received it over a year late, but
we’re delighted with it; highly recom-
mended.) Very late entry; 1990 publication,
received in March 1992.

Barron, Neil, ed. Horror Literature: A
Reader’s Guide. Garland, ISBN 0-8240-
4347-2, 596pp, hardcover, $49.95. (Refer-
ence book, first edition; another valuable
critical/bibliographical resource for infor-
mation on the horror field past and present;
it contains overlaps with the above volume,
ori fantasy, but we’re similarly delighted
with it; highly recommended.) Very late
entry: 1990 publication, received in March
1992.

Beaumont, Charles, The Howling Man.
Edited by Roger Anker, lor, ISBN 0-812-
50552-2, xxxii-t-572pp, paperback, $4.99.

interzonc July 1992 69

(Horror/fantasy collection, first published
as Charles Beaumont; Selected Stories in
1988; this is a big, meaty “Best of Beau-
mont,” with appreciations by Robert Bloch,
Ray Bradbury, Roger Gorman, Harlan Elli-
son, Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan,
Chad Oliver and others; recommended.)
March 1992.

Benford, Gregory, and William Rotsler.
Shiva Descending. Tor, ISBN 0-812-51690-
7, 396pp, paperback, $4.99. (Sf novel, first
published in 1980; this reissue contains a
new two-page “Afterword” by Benford; he
describes the book as a “Big Rock Hits
Earth” novel.) March 1992.

Brenner, Mayer Alan. Spell of Fate: The
Dance of Gods #3. DAW, ISBN 0-88677-
508-6, 428pp, paperback, $4.99. (Humor-
ous fantasy novel, first edition.) March
1992.

Clarke, Arthur C. How the World Was One:
Beyond the Global Village. Bantam, ISBN
0-553-07440-7, 295pp, hardcover, $22.50.
(Non-fiction pop-science text by a leading
sf author; first edition; proof copy received;
described as “a fascinating account of the
history of telecommunications, from the
visionary mind that postulated the orbital
telecom satellite,” it appears to be a rewrite
and considerable expansion of his earlier
book Voice Across the Sea [1958; revised
1974].) 15th June 1992.

Egan, Doris. Two-Bit Heroes. DAW, ISBN
0-88677-500-0, 319pp, paperback, $4.99.
(Sf novel, first edition; apparently the
second of an adventure series which began
with The Gate of Ivory.) Late entry: January
1992 publication, received in March.

Feist, Raymond E., and Janny Wurts. Mis-
tress of the Empire. Doubleday/Founda-
tion, ISBN 0-385-24719-2, 613pp, hard-
cover, $20. (Fantasy novel, first edition;
proof copy received; third and concluding
volume in the trilogy which began with
Daughter of the Empire and Servant of the
Empire.) 15th June 1992.

Forest, Elizabeth. Phoenix Fire. DAW, ISBN
0-88677-515-9, 364pp, paperback, $4.99.
(Fantasy novel, first edition.) March 1992.

Garcia, Robert T., ed. Chilled to the Bone;
A Chill Anthology of Horror and Dark Fan-
tasy. Mayfair Games [PO Box 48539, Niles,
Illinois 60648, USA], ISBN 0-923763-44-9,
246pp, trade paperback, $9.95. (Horror
anthology, first edition; contains all-new
stories by Matthew J. Costello, Charles de
Lint, Andre Norton, Judith & Garfield
Reeves-Stevens, Steve & Melanie Tern and
others.) Late entry: 1991 publication,
received in March 1992.

Grant, Charles L. Stunts. Tor, ISBN 0-812-
50698-7, 438pp, paperback, $4.99. (Horror
novel, first published in 1990; reviewed by
MaryGentle in Interzone 52.) March 1992.

Greenberg, Martin H. and Rosalind M., eds.
Horse Fantastic. Introduction by Jennifer
Roberson. DAW, ISBN 0-88677-504-3,
xii-(-314pp, paperback, $4.50. (Fantasy
anthology, first edition; contains all-origi-
nal stories on an equine theme by Mercedes
Lackey, Barry N. Malzberg, Elizabeth Moon,
Mike Resnick, Jennifer Roberson, Nancy
Springer, Mary Stanton, Judith Tarr, Janny
Wurts and others; perhaps significantly , the
stories by the two male authors named
above, Malzberg and Resnick, are about
horse-racing rather than about horses for
their own sweet sakes.) Late entry:
December 1991 publication, received in
March 1992.

Hogan, Ernest. High Aztec. “Ben Bova Pre-
sents.” Tor, ISBN 0-812-50866-1, 248pp,
paperback, $3.99. (Sf novel, first edition; a
second novel by the author of Cortez on Jup-
iter.) Late entry; February 1992 publication,
received in March.

Huff, Tanya. Blood Trail. DAW, ISBN 0-
88677-502-7, 304pp, paperback, $4.50.

(Fantasy novel, first edition; apparently the
second of a series about Canadian vampires
and werewolves which began with Blood
Price.) Late entry: February 1992 publica-
tion, received in March.

Jeter, K.W. Wolf Flow. St Martin’s Press,
0-312-07125-6, 247pp, hardcover, $18.95.
(Horror novel, first edition; the title is a
palindrome.) 14th April 1992.

Lindholm, Megan. Alien Earth. Bantam/
Spectra, ISBN 0-553-29749-X, 385pp,

paperback, $5.99. (Sf novel, first edition;
proof copy received.) July 1992.

McCarty, John. John McCarty’s Official
Splatter Movie Guide, Volume 2 : Hundreds
More of the Grossest, Goriest, Most Out-
rageous Movies Ever Made. St Martin’s
Press, ISBN 0-312-07046-2, 199pp, trade
paperback, $12.95. (Horror movie guide,
first edition.) Late entry; February 1992
publication, received in March.

Modesitt,L.E., Jr. In Endless Twilight. “Vol-
ume III of The Forever Hero.” Tor, ISBN
0-812-52000-9, 316pp, paperback, $3.99.
(Sf novel, first published in 1988.) ^arch
1992.

Niven, Larry, and Steven Barnes. Achilles’
Choice. Illustrated by Boris Vallejo. Tor,
ISBN 0-812-51083-6, 249pp, paperback,
$4.99. (Sf novel, first published in 1991.)
April 1992.

Norton, Andre, with P.M. Griffin. Storms
of Victory. Witch World: The Turning. Tor,
ISBN 0-812-51109-3, 432pp, paperback,
$4.99. (Fantasy collection, first published
in 1991; contains two short novels, “Port of
Dead Ships” by Norton and “Seakeep” by
Griffin.) March 1992.

Paxson, Diana L. The Jewel of Fire: The
Seventh Book of Westria. Tor, ISBN 0-812-
51110-7, 309pp, paperback, $3.99. (Fantasy
novel, first edition [?]; it says “Copyright
1986” inside, but we think this is an error.)
March 1992.

Pohl, Frederik. Stopping at Slowyear. Ban-
tam/Spectra, ISBN 0-553-29487-3, 151pp,
paperback, $3.50. (Sf novella; first pub-
lished as a chapbook by Pulphouse Publish-
ing in 1991; proof copy received.) June
1992.

Rawn, Melanie. The Dragon Token; Dragon
Star, Book II. DAW, ISBN 0-88677-493-4,
560pp, hardcover, $20. (Fantasy novel, first
edition.) Late entry: February 1992 publica-
tion, received in March.

Reichert, Mickey Zucker. The Last of the
Renshai: Book One of The Renshai Trilogy .

DAW, ISBN 0-88677-503-5, 629pp, paper-
back, $5.99. (Fantasy novel, first edition;
this is the first work by this author we have
seen, although she has already written no
less than five volumes of the “Bifrost Guar-
dians” series, none of them published in
Britain.) Late entry; January 1992 publica-
tion, received in March.

Robinson, Frank M. The Dark Beyond the
Stars, Tor, ISBN 0-812-51383-5, 408pp,
paperback, $4.99. (Sf novel, first published
in 1991; reviewed by Ken Brown in Inter-
zone 52.) March 1992.

Saberhagen, Fred. The Seventh Book of
Lost Swords: Wayfinder’s Story. Tor, ISBN
0-312-85000-X, 251pp, hardcover, $17.95.
(Fantasy novel, first edition; proof copy
received.) June 1992.

Sarrantonio, Al. Skeletons. Bantam/Falcon,
ISBN 0-553-29754-6, 406pp, paperback,
$4.99. (Horror [?] novel, first edition; proof
copy received.) July 1992.

Shahar, Eluki bes. Darktraders; Hellflower
2. DAW, ISBN 0-88677-507-8, 254pp,

paperback, $4.50. (Sf novel, first edition.)
March 1992.

Silke, James. Frank Frazetta’s Death
Dealer, Book 2: Lords of Destruction. Tor,
ISBN 0-812-53821-8, 342pp, paperback,
$3.95. (Fantasy novel, first published in
1989.) March 1992.

Silverberg, Robert, Thebes of the Hundred
Gates. Bantam/Spectra, ISBN 0-553-29494-
6, 116pp, paperback, $3.50. (Sf novella; first
published as a chapbook by Pulphouse Pub-
lishing in January 1992; proof copy
received.) July 1992.

Williaips, Walter Jon. Voice of the Whirl-
wind. Tor, ISBN 0-812-51924-8, 278pp,
paperback, $3.99. (Sf novel, first published
in 1987; reviewed by Ken Brown in IZ 33
and by Paul Brazier in IZ 46.) March 1992.

Willis, Connie. Doomsday Book. Bantam/
Spectra, ISBN 0-553-08131-4, 438pp,

hardcover, $22. (Sf novel, first edition;
proof copy received; the first new novel in
five years from the author of the Campbell
Award-winning Lincoln’s Dreams.) 15th
June 1992.

Wright, T.M. Little Boy Lost. Tor, ISBN 0-
312-93172-7, 247pp, hardcover, $18,95.
(Horror novel, first edition; proof copy
received.) June 1992.

Zahn, Timothy. Dark Force Rising: Star
Wars, Volume 2. Bantam, ISBN 0-553-
08574-3, 376pp, hardcover, $18.50.

(Shared-universe sf novel, first edition;
proof copy received; the second in a new
cycle of “original” Star Wars adventures,
based on the characters created by George
Lucas, it has a first printing of 250,000
copies; gulp.) 15th May 1992.

This issue’s Small Ads and
“Coming Next Month” box appear
on page 60.

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